Origins (Remote) (15 page)

Outside, people came and went, a crowd made up of jean clad students mixed with the odd professor type, all wearing casual clothes. It was a relaxed atmosphere on campus and nobody seemed inclined to wear anything uncomfortable. When the tall man in the black suit walked up to the phones Ronnie saw him right away. He stopped by the bank of receivers and instead of picking one up began to scan the building. Ronnie slid his chair back just enough to allow him to see the stranger without exposing himself through the window into the snack room. He watched as the man stood there looking over the crowd. When he turned and headed toward the Student Center Ronnie grabbed
Cassie’s hand and pulled her down, crouching head level with the table.

“What?”
Cassie said.

“That guy right there. I don’t like the looks of him. He’s watching for something.”

Cassie scanned the snack area. The small room had only one entrance and they couldn’t get trapped. She immediately headed out the single entrance into the main hall. The man in the black suit was just reaching the glass doors and the movement caught his eye. He quickened his pace, headed right for them. Cassie broke into a run, with Ronnie a split second after her. Dodging through the crowd they cut diagonally across the open hall. The staircase to the second floor was set in the center of the room and the two small figures hit it at full speed, careening around an ascending set of levels. When they reached the top, Cassie turned again and set off at right angles down an open hall, Ronnie right behind her. A series of doors ran along each side. Small name plates identified the occupants. There was another hall at the end that branched off right and left and they hooked to the left. Footsteps were pounding up the stairs behind them, they could hear the change in tone as their pursuer hit the hallway.

“There!” Ronnie said. There was a fire door directly in front of them, and another hall that went back off to the left. “No, No, No.”
Cassie said, her words spitting out of her throat. “Don’t stop.” Ronnie ran on, taking the left down the hall that would bring them back to the center of the building. Cassie hit the door full speed and jammed her hands against the bar brace, throwing it open with a bang. She flung herself back. Ronnie had slowed down in confusion and she passed him again, leading the way. “Come on, Come on, Come on.” They came out into the main hall just down from the center staircase, and headed for it at a full run. Storming down, they turned away at ground level, headed back to the front of the building. Once out of the front door there was a hundred yards of open field between them and the levee. Ronnie was getting winded but kept pushing, his breath coming in gasps. Cassie was pulling away steadily. He struggled to keep up. They reached the levee, flinging themselves down on the other side of the slope. Cassie crawled back, her head just over the top.

“I don’t see him. I think he went down the stairs and came out on the other side. He’s looking for us over there. We’ve got to get our bags and find someplace to hide. They’ll be all over the place now.”

Thorne was furious at the narrow miss but confident he was getting closer. The circle was getting smaller and smaller. He had twelve men in the area. He sent three to cover the exits of the campus and another half a dozen to walk among the buildings. The other three were sent in cars to cruise the perimeter of the campus. He himself returned to the phone banks, feeding coins into the nearest open one. They had called home and he knew they would again if he gave them the chance. His men manning the taps answered on the first ring.

“Shut down the parent’s phone.” Thorne said when they picked up. “I don’t want them to be able to call anybody there.”

“Yes, Sir,” his man said. “And Sir? You might be interested in this. We traced all the calls coming from that payphone for a half hour before and after the one to the Reynold house. Someone called the newspaper from that phone.”

Thorne thought about that. There was no way to trace who the call went to but it was a good bet they’d gotten hold of a reporter, probably the one who wrote the article about their disappearance. “Get someone on Justin Breed. Now.” He hung up the phone, looked around, and started for the Student Center. They had to be close by and this was the only place with public phones. They would be forced to come here to use the phone or take their chances getting out of the neighborhood, where he had men stationed on all major roads.

Breed was sitting at his desk when Woods came through the door, spotting him in the open room. The detective waved him over and they left the building together, walking down the street to a bus stop where they sat on the bench by themselves. Breed was undecided whether to tell Woods about Cassie’s call, figuring he could wait and see what Woods had to say. It wasn’t much more than Breed knew already.

“The girl called her mother,” Woods said. “She didn’t say much, other than that she was with the boy and she was alright. We still don’t know where they are but we do know they plan on coming home. We just don’t know when.”

Breed hung back, waiting for more. He was in an odd position. He had written an article, leaving out information at the request of Woods. Now he was the one who didn’t want to leak anything. If he was going to be in on the investigation later he couldn’t run the risk of Woods finding out. On the other hand, the kids were looking for someone they could trust. Was there some reason they couldn’t trust the police? Did Woods know more than he was letting on? He decided to let it pass.

“I had an odd experience the other day. Remember I told you I knew somebody at the phone company? He called me back. Basically he told me not to ask about those phone numbers you gave me for that scholarship program. He also said not to call him again anytime soon. He’s never done that before. Why would he be so nervous?”

Woods nodded his head. “That’s where this thing is coming from I think. Out of all the things we know about these kids the only thing that stands out, that connects them to something unusual, is this scholarship thing. I went to the school and asked about it. They gave me the names of the people, and those phone numbers, and the name of the program. But it doesn’t exist.”

“Doesn’t exist? What? The people or the program?” Breed said.

“Either one. We ran the names and they don’t show up connected with anything down here. There are some people with the same name but none of them have been in New Orleans. The scholarship program doesn’t exist anywhere we can find. Nobody has ever heard of it and I’ve talked to admissions people at every college in the area.”

Breed shook his head, trying to take it all in. A scholarship program that didn’t exist. Three dead men. Two kids running from something. There was just no way to put it all together. “For Christ’s sake, Woods, that doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Woods threw up his hands. “It doesn’t make any sense to me either. All I know is I’ve got two kids out there and nothing to go on, nothing that leads me anywhere.“ He stood up and lit a cigarette, pacing back and forth on the street in front of the reporter. “I’ve got to find those kids. They’re the key to the whole thing.”

Breed got up himself. He wasn’t going to tell Woods about the call from
Cassie. He was going to get these kids in alone and listen to what they had to say. How he was going to get them in was something he would have to figure out later. But there were other things he could do right now. He could publish his story, complete with all the details on the deaths and the break in at the Gilmore’s. He saw it going two ways. Either the news would push these people into doing something to expose themselves or they’d go away, not wanting the publicity. In either case he’d get a crack at talking to the kids. He hoped.

“Well,” Breed said. “I can’t hold off much longer on running my story. Day after tomorrow at the latest it’s going to be printed.”

Woods looked at him and nodded. He knew exactly what Breed was thinking. He couldn’t see any other way himself. “Do it,” he said, flicked his cigarette into the street, and walked off.

Neither Cassie nor Ronnie had any intention of using the phone anytime soon.

“You think they traced the call?” Ronnie asked. “Can they do it that quick?”

“I don’t know,” Cassie answered. “It’s either that or they got pretty damn lucky.” They had sneaked back into the low bushes surrounding the park. For the last fifteen minutes Ronnie has been lying flat on his stomach, watching every pedestrian that walked by and every car that drove the lakefront. He didn’t see anything suspicious. “I’m thinking they’re still checking the campus,” he told Cassie when he crawled back to her. Maybe we should take off now. If we stay low on the steps, walk along the waterline, nobody can see us from the road.”

“Yeah, but if someone does check the steps they can see us for a mile and then we’ve got nowhere to hide.” Getting out of the neighborhood was going to be a problem. Stay, and they could get trapped right where they were. Try and leave and run the risk of being caught with nowhere else to go. Neither sounded like a good option. They sat concealed in the bushes next to the amusement park, arguing their chances either way, when a thought came to Ronnie.

“What’s the thing they wouldn’t expect us to do?” he asked Cassie.

Cassie
was put out with him. It was time to run and she had told him so but he wasn’t budging. “I don’t know, maybe sit here and wait for them to scoop us up?”

“Somebody’s in a snit,” Ronnie said. He hadn’t seen any sign of a temper in
Cassie since they met but he was getting one now. “No,” he said. “But we’ve been sitting next to the amusement park for an hour now and look at that parking lot.”

Cassie
stuck her head out of the hiding place. Aligned in the parking lot fifty yards away was a line of school busses, their charges set free to run around for the day, a treat before the school year closed. The park would be full, maybe not as full as it would be in the coming summer, but there would be enough kids that hiding among them wouldn’t be a problem. All they had to do was make it to the park entrance and they’d be lost.

Cassie
turned and looked at Ronnie, a smile on her face. “You win this one. I’m going to buy you a cotton candy when we get in.”

That decided, they rummaged through their bags, changing into different shirts in case Thorne’s men had broadcast a description. That done they stashed their bags again and took a long look around. Seeing no one suspicious, they crawled out of the bushes, ambling along the sidewalk, trying to appear in no particular hurry. With people still arriving in groups it was easy to attach themselves to a group of kids following a mother with a stroller. At the entrance they paid for their tickets, and walked into a park crowded enough for anyone to get lost in the bustle.

Cassie looked around, broke into a grin, and said “You’re a genius. We’ll stay till closing time.”

A thousand miles away in Washington, DC , Archer was experiencing a growing sense of concern over the project in New Orleans. Ronnie would have recognized the major holder of that concern as the stout man he’d seen when he followed Thorne’s conversation back to the source. Archer was having second thoughts. He’d been the one to assign Thorne to the project, never sensing that things would reach the kind of success he was thinking could happen now. In their phone conversations Archer had been firm in his instructions to Thorne but perhaps, he was thinking now, not firm enough. Thorne had his unruly side. An effective weapon and a reliable man, but weapons could sometimes go awry. Humans were the most difficult weapon of all to control.

Thorne had been under his command for years, a factor that had given him confidence in his judgment. Perhaps too much confidence. It was obvious the situation down in New Orleans was more than anyone bargained for. This kind of thing called for a cool head and the utmost discretion. Thorne had the cool head but he wasn’t known for his discretion. He was more likely to take the bull by the horns than let it pass under the cape. The General’s problem now was pulling him back. Like a wolf after a long chase, Thorne would be frantic and hungry, eager to prove he had everything under his control. General Archer was a man that learned from his mistakes. He was feeling the weight of his mistake now. It was time to rein things in, let the dust settle. His fear was that Thorne would ignore his orders, and expose the program to even greater scrutiny. There were ways to deal with that possibility though Archer regretted the idea of losing Thorne. But no man was bigger than the organization that employed him. Archer had learned that long ago. His decision made, he buzzed his secretary. “Tell Forstall to come see me after lunch.” That done, he turned to other matters.

The two subjects of Archer’s project spent the day worrying about nothing. The atmosphere of the park lifted their spirits. Picking out anyone in the throngs of people would have been difficult and picking out two kids in particular would have been impossible.
Cassie and Ronnie made a visit to every ride in the park, gracing the Zephyr roller coaster and the Wild Mouse with repeated trips. A ride in The Barrel, a spinning cylinder that pinned you against the wall from centrifugal force and dropped the floor beneath you, left them gasping and Ronnie feeling sick to his stomach. They took a break, buying drinks at a stand and sitting in the shade of the pavilion looking out over Lake Ponchartrain.

The day was warm, the sun shining on the lake, a light breeze coming off the water. The small stretch of sandy beach behind the park was packed with people, blankets scattered around. Clusters of swimmers waded in and out of the water. Further out a few boats made their way back and forth, pleasure boats and fisherman starting their spring enjoyment of the open water.
Cassie and Ronnie sat away from the families but they could see the picnic baskets and smell their contents from where they were sitting. The aroma of cotton candy and hot dogs mixed together. It wasn’t long before Ronnie’s queasy stomach settled down into a low growl.