Salem's Cipher (20 page)

59

Amherst, Massachusetts

J
ason's jaw was hanging. He stood at the window of the Speed Wash Laundromat on Pray Street, across from the Amherst West Cemetery, watching the fiasco play out. Agent Clancy Johnson and his partner were cuffing Salem Wiley and Isabel.

Those women were
his
. Clancy Johnson had been directed to keep his distance.

Jason had never missed a target in his life. He was pleased to see his hand steady as he withdrew his phone.

Carl Barnaby picked up on the second ring and spoke without preamble. “They've been arrested?”

Jason felt the fall-stop of deep unease. Wiley and Isabel's arrest hadn't been a mistake. Barnaby had ordered this. “My instructions were to harvest the women and get the list. I can't do that if they're in FBI custody.”

Carl Barnaby chuckled, but his conviviality lacked its usual soothing effect. “Consider it a favor. The women are on hold, perfectly preserved until you are done with the real job: the Crucible.”

It was as if someone had set fire to Jason's stomach. “I had planned to take care of
all
of it. There's time. We have five days until I need to be in San Francisco.”

“True,” Barnaby said. “But there's too much at stake. The Crucible is more important than any other woman in the world right now. If she wins, she'll be untouchable. I want you in California early to make sure everything is in place. But listen to this.”

Jason was trying to heed, but he was so angry that the world was going white. He could have done it all. He had the situation under control. All his power was being snatched from him, leaving him a small, trembling boy, skinned by the world, nowhere to hide.

You're not man enough to eat something raw.

“The FBI is taking the women in for a planned dismissal of the Crucible.” Barnaby's laughter deepened. “Isn't that rich? Her maintenance team will need to divert resources from actually protecting her to investigate the girls. Meanwhile, if the girls already possess the list, our contact will retrieve it when he drops them off at the local police station. If they don't yet have it, I've been assured that they'll be held for at least a week, until long after your work with the Crucible is done. Once they're released, we'll have a new corporate structure. You can follow them to the list, dismiss them once they have it in hand, and use the names on the list to shut down the Underground once and for all.”

The white was fading, leaving pulsing red dots. “I could have taken care of them here and still gotten to the Crucible.”

“Jason!” Barnaby's tone was acid with reproach. “Are you arguing with me?”

Jason exhaled through his nose, moderating his breath so it didn't make noise. “I'm sorry. This job is so important.”

Barnaby continued, mollified. “Of course it is. I appreciate that you value that. Remember, you'll still get the glory. You just have to wait a bit.”

“Yes sir. I can do that.”

“I thought so.” Barnaby lowered his voice. “There's one more thing. I'm sending a colleague to support you. He'll meet you in Boston, and you'll fly to San Francisco together, first thing tomorrow morning. Both your flights are booked.”

“A colleague? Who?”

But Jason knew. The black pit that his stomach had become was certain that it was the only man he'd ever been afraid of. They'd all been troublemakers in the Lower Ninth, every last one of them, but they'd also been victims. The unspoken rule among them was that they never hurt one another, and they all followed this imperative—all but one, the one who spent every spare moment exercising his fingers, performing endless rounds of fingertip push-ups, punching rocks with them, using them to lift impossible weights.

That one hadn't earned his name because he was kindly, crafty, or Italian.

He'd gotten it because he would stick his fingers in you and make you do things you didn't want to but would do forever if only he'd remove them.

“Geppetto. You'll remember him. We got you both from New Orleans, didn't we? You worked together in Minnesota, what, ten, twelve years ago? Looks like you'll finally get a chance to finish that business together.”

Jason robotically hung up the phone and walked outside to his car parked at the far end of the lot. It had actually been fourteen years ago they'd worked together, fourteen years since Jason had last seen Geppetto. Jason had wept on that assignment. He'd been an adult but still sobbed like an infant, the pain had been that bad. His face grew hot with the memory.

He sat inside his car, sipping air. He needed music to mask the noise he was about to make, so he turned on the radio. He recognized the song that came on: “99 Problems.” It wasn't Jay-Z's version, but something thumping, sexier, gypsy blues, commiserating with him about girl problems.

He ghost-smiled, the expression a raw gash of red against white flesh. The universe had a sense of humor.

Some days, that was the most you could ask for.

He pulled out of the laundromat lot and drove to the outskirts of town, steering into the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse. The song was winding down. He wished it wouldn't. He'd like to hear it again. He glanced over at the woman in the passenger-side footwell.

He hadn't been able to do it, to eat her flesh. His mom had been right about him. He wasn't a proper man. The woman was alive and physically unharmed. Crusted tracks on her cheeks and neck marked the path of her tears. She wouldn't look at Jason.

He parked the car behind the tilting barn.

He unbuckled.

He reached inside his jacket with one hand, turning up the last morsel of the song with the other.

His smile was gone as he leaned toward the woman.

The first spurt splashed the interior light with a haunted-house red.

When he was finished, blood would paint the doors and ceiling.

In the distant part of his mind that was freed to think, Jason decided that once he was done here, he'd clean up and go back to the Amherst police station, find out where Salem Wiley and Isabel were being held. His flight out of Boston didn't leave until tomorrow. He had time to prove to Barnaby that Geppetto wasn't needed after all.

The realization was so relieving that he laughed out loud as he sliced.

60

Amherst, Massachusetts

T
he Amherst Police Department was new construction, designed with a red brick turret to make it blend in with the church next to it. Despite its exterior warmness, its holding rooms were the same sterile white cubes as any police department Lucan Stone had ever been in, the coffee the same bitter pitch.

He and Clancy sat across the table from Salem Wiley and Isabel Odegaard.

If there'd been a shred of oxygen to the bullshit assassination charges, the women would have been questioned separately. As it was, both men
were going through the motions until their SAC told them differently.

“Tell me what you know about Senator Gina Hayes,” Clancy asked, taking the lead.

Bel knew the routine. “She's running for president. She's a Democrat. I intend to vote for her. I have no intention of assassinating her.”

Salem stared at her hands, massaging the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Her hair was glossy from three days on the road, her natural body oils morphing her fuzzy curls into smooth ringlets. Both women smelled ripe, musky.

“Salem?” Stone asked softly.

She glanced up. Every inch of her was sweet and fierce-scared. She reminded Stone of the kitten he'd discovered walking home from school when he was fifteen. The Detroit neighborhood he'd grown up in was broken glass and rusting steel. You'd be more likely to find a used syringe than a four-leaf clover in the playground grass, at least until they tore up the playground to build a parking lot. So when Stone happened across that little spitting ball of fur in the crook of the only tree on the block, he'd known it was something special. He'd coaxed the kitten down, let it scratch and bite him, tucked it in his coat and ran all the way home. His mother had made him take it to the animal shelter. He understood why. He'd still named it on the way.

“I know what Bel knows.” Salem returned her attention to her hands.

Stone wished he could hold those hands until she felt safe enough to look at him. Something about her green eyes—he wanted her to
see
him. He managed to keep his voice neutral, barely. “What are you two doing in Massachusetts?”

Isabel Odegaard certainly knew she could request a lawyer. Probably she also knew what a waste of time it would be. “Touring. It's a beautiful state this time of year. Look,” she said, slapping her palms on the table and leaning forward, “what's the score here? Do you need us to tell you something about our mothers, and you'll let us go? Because we don't know anything.”

“Like we said at the cemetery,” Clancy said mildly, “you two are under arrest for a conspiracy to assassinate Senator Gina Hayes. We've found evidence on her”—he made a gun out of his finger and fired it at Salem—“home computer that implicates both of you. Hayes's schedule, her security detail, information on her upcoming Alcatraz speech that
no one
without clearance should have.”

Salem's eyes shot up, her mouth a shocked O. “Someone hacked into my computer?”

Stone thought she sounded surprised rather than scared. Made sense. With her computer science and cryptography degrees, she was sure to have secure firewalls. The woman was something of a legend, from what Stone had gathered from his friends in Computer Forensics. The FBI had had a file on her before any of this happened. Same with the NSA. They all wanted Salem Wiley to come work for them.

He just wanted her to survive the week.

“You can hold us, what, forty-eight hours without pressing charges?” Bel asked.

Clancy rubbed his nose. “Massachusetts says seventy-two.”

“Then get on it.” Bel sat back, her cheeks flushed. She crossed her arms. “Because we don't have anything else to say.”

Stone understood their frustration. Based on their behavior and demeanor, the two women believed that one or both of their mothers was still alive, and they were on some sort of mission to save them. He almost wished he could let them go, but the orders to hold them had come from the top. Either someone had called in a favor, or the SAC had been presented with evidence he could not disregard.

Clancy's phone buzzed on his belt. Did he go pale for a moment? He reached into his jacket and pulled out his phone, glanced at it, turned the phone's face to Stone. Stone saw it was the Senior Agent in Charge phoning. Clancy stood and walked outside to take the call.

“I think we're done here.” Stone pushed his chair back. “Someone will be in shortly to show you to your cell.” He waited a moment in the hopes that Wiley would finally look at him. She didn't. Odegaard, however, used her eyes like swords to slice him from tip to toe. He almost didn't tamp the smile down in time. In his five years in the FBI, he'd never run across a pair like this: tough, terrified, and as smart as a slap.

He locked the door on the way out and gave instructions to the officer waiting outside to ready a cell. Clancy was hanging up the phone.

“SAC wants us in Iowa. Senator Hayes's next public stop.” Clancy jabbed his thumb at the holding room. “He's worried about these two, has a tip that the slicer is connected to plans to kill what's gonna be the first female president, and that it's gonna be on his hands because we didn't catch the guy in time.”

They walked toward the exit. Stone examined angles. “What do we do in Iowa?”

Clancy grabbed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and stuffed it in his mouth. “I dunno. Tell Hayes to watch out for bad guys? Juggle our nuts?” He switched the toothpick to the other side and stopped abruptly. “Hey, Stone.”

His tone of voice made Stone pause. They'd been partners for two years. They'd slept in the same hotel room, eaten more meals together than apart, and seen things that would give an Army vet nightmares. In those two years, until the Hawthorne Hotel lobby, Stone hadn't developed strong feelings either way for the man. But now, something in Clancy's eyes made Stone wonder if they would have been friends had they met outside this business.

“How bad does this stink to you?” Clancy asked.

“Pretty bad,” Stone agreed.

“You saw what was taken off of 'em, right? Two burner phones, Wiley's iPhone, Odegaard's licensed piece, pocket junk, a bottle of prescription pills, that tracker dot that I assume you planted back at the Hawthorne, and a goddamned handwritten Emily Dickinson poem. What are we supposed to do with that?”

Stone had seen all those things. He'd also witnessed Clancy's reaction to the poem. The man had seemed puzzled, and then annoyed, and then tossed the poem back into the holdings pile like dirty toilet paper. Stone wondered what he'd been expecting to find. “We leave it. Whoever the uppers call in to finish this trumped-up case can sort it out.”

“Yeah,” Clancy said, his voice quiet. They resumed their walk to the front door, the hive buzz of the police station swarming around them. “So why do I think those two won't make it to the end of the week, even if neither of them does a damn thing wrong?”

Stone held the door for Clancy. Neither man attempted to meet the other's eyes. There was no need. They were both thinking the same thing. And the only reason Stone could walk out these doors was because jail—at least what passed for jail in this town—was currently the safest place for Salem Wiley and Isabel Odegaard.

61

Twenty-Six Years Old

“S
alem, this is Rachel. Rachel, Salem.”

The woman holds out her petite hand. Everything about her makes Salem feel like a huge, torpid moose. “I've heard so much about you!”

Salem shakes her hand. She realizes it's the first time she's been in the same room as Bel in a year. “You too.” It's not true, but it's the polite thing to say. Salem and Bel circle each other like strangers, relatives who only connect on holidays.

“How's work? You still at the community ed center?” Bel turns to Rachel. “She teaches computer to inner city kids. A computer genius with a huge heart.”

Salem smiles. Or at least she thinks she does. She's not sure if it reaches her face. “Yep. And I got offered a research assistant job at the college.”

“Think you'll take it?”

“I think so.” The stilted small talk squeezes Salem tighter and tighter until she's trapped in an airless box. When Daniel died, Bel had moved in to Salem's house and slept in her bed until she relearned to fall asleep on her own. When Salem's mom forgot to shop for groceries or make meals, Bel made sure Gracie knew so that there was always food in Salem's house. When Michael Dingboom asked Salem to senior prom “as a friend,” Bel had driven back all the way from Chicago to help her get ready and give her kissing pointers, just in case.

That same Bel stands across from her now, a million miles away, twitchy, her and Rachel acting like they'd rather be anywhere else in the world. Bel makes alone time for Salem only once during the visit. It is to take Salem aside and ask her what she thinks of Rachel.

Salem makes the mistake of telling her the truth.

They won't speak again until Halloween morning.