Side by Side (16 page)

37

Click Smoot reclined in a padded leather chair in front of the twelve-thousand-dollar plasma-screen television set that someone named Dakin T. Wilson had unwittingly bought for him. It was the first time Click had gone into the Advance Capital mainframe, using a code he had purchased from a programmer at the bank. If there was a trail to Click, the programmer would make it a circular track to nowhere.

He was watching a DVD called
The Number One Stripper in America Contest,
and at that moment he was imagining that he was right there in the club and the girl was stripping just for him. Had he not been engaged in a sexual fantasy, he might have heard the strangers coming in through the back door. He opened his eyes to get another look at a blonde who was doing a series of squat twists, when he noticed the two men standing in his kitchen doorway, looking right at him.

“What the hell!?” Click yelled. The men smiled, and he knew they were smiling at what he was doing to himself under the towel in his lap. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said indignantly.

“Saying hello,” the smaller of the two men said in a foreign accent. “Don’t let us interrupt your
beeg
show.”

Click was more embarrassed than frightened or angry, but he was plenty scared and pissed off by the intrusion. And he resented being pulled so violently from his engagement with the stripper.

“Get out,” he ordered.

“Sorry we didn’t have an appointment,” the smaller man, who looked like a detective, said. The larger one looked like he might be a plainclothes cop too.

The strangers walked straight into his den like they’d been invited, and the small one sat on the arm of the couch, while the larger one sat in the middle of it. Click’s closest handgun, a loaded Smith & Wesson .357, was under the couch cushion beside the larger guy’s right thigh.

Smaller weasel-looking guy took a cigarette out of a fancy red pasteboard box and lit it with what appeared to be a Dunhill lighter. “An excessive semen supply is the curse of youth. I know that as well as anyone.” He made a fist and imitated the deed in the air, leering. Larger guy smiled. “You don’t mind if I smoke, Click,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“You don’t got a search warrant, get out.”

The small man laughed. “We’re not police officers. Of course, you don’t know who we are. How rude of me.”

Click shrugged. “Why would I know you?”

“Maybe your father mentioned me. I am with a company that does some business with your father’s boss, Mr. Laughlin.”

Click chortled. “You don’t know jack. Mr. Laughlin isn’t my father’s boss. He’s his lawyer.”

“Max here is an associate of Hunter Bryce. You know who he is?”

“Yeah, I know who he is. He’s a loser on trial for murdering a Fed. That doesn’t tell me who
you
are.”

“Has Peanut ever mentioned a Russian he isn’t very fond of?”

“My father hates all foreigners. He hates Russians worse than all the others put together.”

“My name is Serge Sarnov. My associate is Max Randall.” The Russian wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Cool. Now, get the hell out of my house. You know who my daddy is, then you know you don’t want to piss him off.”

“I am not concerned with angering your father,” Sarnov said.

“You ought to be,” Click said. “You sure ought to be.”

Click noticed the Randall guy wasn’t a talker. He was watching the girl on the screen. He had fought back a smile on the tonsil zinger.

Sarnov waved his hand in the air, lit cigarette and all. “Your father is a crude man,” the Russian said. “No worldview. No grasp of current events and how things outside his realm might affect him. If he feels wronged by someone, he has to retaliate physically. He is doomed.”

“He does pretty fine.”

“As long as he is in his environment, so does a red-ass baboon. Does that offend you? You are not like the other people in your family. Not at all.” Sarnov shook his trigger finger at Click like a teacher gently admonishing a student. “You are brilliant, my young friend. I have to wonder if you were adopted. I mean, I have seen your family. I know why you live all alone. You have all of the class they lack. According to Mr. Laughlin, you are a genius about to come into your own.
You
are the future of the Smoots.”

Click had to smile to hear that Mr. Ross Laughlin talked about him. He felt himself blushing. “So what? Peanut doesn’t allow outside people to mess with his folks, especially not his kids.”

“I didn’t come to
mess
with you, Click. On the contrary, I came to discuss exploring some mutually profitable opportunities that could make you an extremely rich young man.”

“Like what?”

“Like using your burgeoning skills to make a lot of money. My organization has international reach and influence. And we have intelligence channels you wouldn’t believe.”

Click said, “I can do just fine with my own people, thank you.”

“I know things you wouldn’t think I’d know.”

“About what?”

“You. You can make a little money using your credit card scams, your little computer schemes. I think if we work together, you will end up with far more than you imagine is possible. Think way above your father’s level. Mr. Laughlin is a good boss for your father, but even he is well below where you can go.”

Click wondered if Ross Laughlin was his father’s boss—the mystery moneyman who protected them. If so, this was news. According to Peanut, Ross Laughlin was an extremely powerful lawyer with major government connections. “You know about Mr. Laughlin, then you know we’ve got all the connections we’ll ever need.”

“A lesson in structure, Click. Your father works for Ross Laughlin and Ross Laughlin works as a partner in a domestic syndicate. We are a hundred times stronger in this country than Laughlin’s aging syndicate. If you are as successful as you surely imagine you will be, which you can be, how much will they let you keep?

“You know I’m telling you the truth. You know your father. You put millions of dollars on the table, and Mr. Laughlin and your father will take . . .” Serge crushed out the cigarette. “. . . ninety-five points, maybe more, because they will see you only as a worker and they are greedy and suspicious. They never even trusted you with the fact that Mr. Laughlin is your daddy’s and therefore your boss. And if this Judge Fondren extortion-by-kidnap scheme doesn’t work as planned, your father is going to have to accept the blame, and he might not live much longer than the woman and her child do. Even if the Fondren thing comes off, your father’s days are numbered. Your only chance at long-term security lies with me, my firm. We will let you be a real partner, and for what we offer we will take but a small percentage. I can get you the things you need to make your plans work, like access codes to accounts to loot with numbers so large you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Like what kinds of accounts and numbers wouldn’t I believe?”

“Antiquated systems controlling accounts with a combined hundred and fifty billion dollars floating around in them gathering cobwebs, with nobody keeping a very close eye on them. A man with the right ability could nibble on them for years before anybody noticed. And there are more like that all over the world.”

“You’re crazy as hell.”

“Is that a no?”

“Damned straight it is. You’re a dead man.”

“Okay.” Sarnov stood and aimed a silenced pistol at Click’s head. “Sorry we couldn’t do business.”

“You said you didn’t come to hurt me!”

“This won’t hurt at all,” Sarnov said. “At least no one has ever complained to me later that it did.”

38

Lucy Dockery swam up out of the void slowly, regaining consciousness to find herself back in the gritty bed in the darkened room. She was naked, and in a lot of pain, certainly made worse because she couldn’t see and had to imagine how serious the damage to her was. Her face was bruised, hair and blood was matted into stiff wafers, and she could feel lines where the skin was laid open. Her lips were split and swollen, her teeth sore but she didn’t think any were broken. Her nose was swollen to twice its size and filled with dried blood. She didn’t think any of her bones were broken, because she could move her arms and legs, fingers and toes, but the joints in her hands ached.

Her nightgown was gone, ripped from her body as she fought Buck from a hopeless position on the floor at his feet.

He hadn’t raped her. He’d stripped her, beaten her senseless, had her flat on the kitchen island with her legs apart, and he’d stopped only because Dixie and a pair of giants came in and pulled him away. Pants bunched around his ankles, he roared as the twins dragged him out the door. Dixie had called Scaly-hands “Buck.”

Lucy remembered the beating, Buck’s hideous grunts of pleasure, the terrified wails of Elijah behind a door only a few feet away. She hadn’t cried out because she couldn’t bear to have Elijah hear her screaming. It seemed so insane, so hopeless, and she didn’t have the slightest idea why these creatures were doing this to them.

Lucy knew that if she didn’t escape, she and probably Eli were going to die, and if that oaf with palms like tree bark had anything to say about it, the trip to death wouldn’t be fast or pretty.

Monday.
Buck had said that until Monday, he could do whatever he wanted to her, because “after that she was just one more dead piece of pussy.”

Why Monday?
She pushed the physical pain away and thought about that.
What would be happening on Monday?
She didn’t even know what day of the week this was. How long before they killed her and Eli? A day? An hour? Was it an idle threat? She didn’t think so.

Why Monday?
She remembered that her father had told her that after Monday they could take Elijah and go to the house in Blowing Rock for a vacation. He had been expecting to deliver his verdict on the Bryce case that day. Had these people abducted them to influence her father’s ruling on that case? That made sense. But that should mean that they wouldn’t kill her if her father ruled for Bryce. Was it because she had seen their faces? That was their fault. They had not tried to remain anonymous, so they must have always planned to kill her. If they were just going to kill her, that was one thing, but because they might kill Eli too, she had to do something and do it fast.

She was smarter than they were and smarter was better than stronger.

She needed a plan to get out of the steel building.

Something else occurred to her. The dogs hadn’t attacked her even when Elijah had cried. She was sure they had wanted to, but something had slowed them, or had perhaps confused them. She smiled to herself as the realization washed over her. And for the first time she was sure that she and Eli might have a shot at escaping after all. A plan. All she needed was a plan, and a lot of luck. She smiled when something occurred to her, and when she did so, the pain hit her, and she remembered Buck’s cruel hands on her. But smiling was worth it. She now had a spark, the beginning of a plan, a way to save her son’s life.

Lucy lay in a fetal position in the dark listening to Dixie sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to Elijah, who, incredibly, was laughing.

39

In the drumming rain, Winter held the Sig Sauer loosely at his side and peered into Click’s den. Standing back from the window, Winter was as good as invisible to the three inhabitants of the room. He couldn’t hear the conversation through the glass, but he could see Serge Sarnov and Max Randall and he could read Sarnov’s lips. Click’s chair was positioned so Winter couldn’t see the young man’s face, just his white socks.

What Winter learned from reading Sarnov’s lips thrilled him. The Russian made Click a job offer, which Click must have declined, because Sarnov pulled a pistol and aimed it at Click. Reflexively, Winter aimed at Sarnov’s head, figuring for deflection and reflection, but he didn’t fire, because—based on Randall’s and Sarnov’s body language—he didn’t believe Sarnov intended to kill Click. He was right. The gun was just the additional incentive the boy needed to reconsider.

Winter wondered if Click was smart enough to know that what the Russian said about Laughlin’s and his father’s greed might be true, but he doubted Click understood that the Russians would not part with any larger share of profits than Click’s own family would. “Join us or die” was not exactly a promising start to the ideal courtship.

Winter waited until Serge holstered his gun to move away from the window. Then he walked to the edge of the yard and sprinted back to Alexa’s car. She was in the driver’s seat.

“What’s the deal?” Alexa asked.

“The Smoots definitely have the Dockerys,” he replied. “Score one for Clayton. You can tell Clayton that Ross Laughlin is not just Peanut’s lawyer—he’s also his boss. Laughlin is definitely our link between the Smoots, Bryce, and Sarnov, Lex. Laughlin is connected to a syndicate, but the Russians are planning to move in on them.”

“You’re sure?”

“Acquisition by force is a standard Russian business plan. That’s what Serge said. I guess that’ll be news to Clayton.”

“I’m sure it will be. Did Serge happen to say where the Dockerys are?”

“Sarnov didn’t say. I couldn’t see Click’s side of the conversation, but I don’t think he mentioned a location either. Maybe Click knows, maybe he doesn’t, but there’s no doubt the Smoots grabbed Lucy and the baby and have them. Sarnov said they’re going to kill them.”

“Even if Bryce walks?”

“I got that impression. We need to find Peanut. He sure as hell knows where they are.”

“They could be anywhere,” Alexa said. “Do we stick with the kid or follow Sarnov?”

“I’d put a tracker on the BMW if we had another one, but I don’t think Sarnov is directly involved with the Dockery abduction, based on the lip-reading I did. We have to get to Peanut, or beat it out of Click.”

“You’re joking?”

“No, not really. Beating it out of Click is a perfectly good idea. Lex, the longer we wait, the more likely something bad will happen to the Dockerys. They’re going to be murdered unless we can get them released, and time is running out for them. You said so yourself.”

“Maybe after Monday, yes.”

“You aren’t sure. Did they share their timetable with Clayton or yourself? If they did, fine. If they didn’t . . .”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she snapped. “You’re going to torture the truth out of a teenager?”

“If it will save the Dockerys, yes. And he’s twenty-one and a criminal coconspirator in a kidnapping and possible double murder.”

“Maybe we won’t have to do that. Clayton says NSA’s Big Ears caught Peanut and Dentures talking. Peanut uses prepaid disposable cell phones, but as soon as Clayton can get the location for the pay phone number she called from, we’ll have something tangible. They could be holding the Dockerys in one of their houses. Maybe we should be checking Peanut’s house, offices, properties.”

“I doubt they’d risk keeping them in an obvious place,” Winter said. “But what the hell. It’s worth a shot.”

After she flipped through the manila folder, Alexa handed the address-printout page to Winter. He used a micro-flashlight with a red lens that he kept on his key chain to read through the stack of Smoot residences and associated business addresses. The file also contained the few known telephone numbers each of the subjects used. Not one of them had a landline, just cell phones. There was also a list of vehicles and license plate numbers.

To Winter the files looked like a thick stack of wasted time and dead ends. Time was something they didn’t have.

“Lex, I have a gut feeling that we have to get to the Dockerys tonight. As soon as we start pushing on one of the Smoots, they’ll know and it’ll be over for the Dockerys, if it isn’t over already. We can’t just sit here with our thumbs submerged.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We’re going to have to start some fires.”

“If we make our presence known, it could cost the Dockerys their lives. You just said so.”

“Damn it, Lex, Lucy and that boy are dead if we don’t move. If we do it right, only the people we interview will know we’re bearing down. You know I’m right.”

“I don’t disagree,” she said. “But what’ll we do after we talk to one of them—lock them in my car trunk?”

“Your trunk’s too small to hold but a couple of them. We can lock them up, though.”

“Kidnap people? Lock them up somewhere . . .”

“I know a safe place we can put them. We have to gather a little field intelligence. We have nothing to lose.”

“Nothing to lose but my job and our freedom. You’re talking about committing felonies.”

“I’m not law enforcement.”

“You’re not a criminal either. Let’s think about this.”

“Alexa. We both know why I’m here. Let’s get this done.”

“I agree. I agree. But not yet. Look, let’s run this past Clayton—”

“No,” Winter cut in. “He’s sitting in a hotel room sucking on his pipe. This isn’t about him, or intelligence he can glean or buy. I don’t need more of his information to get going. I’m not going to sit on my ass waiting for Peanut to ring up Buck.”

“But I think he—”

“I signed on with you to find the Dockerys before somebody kills them. That is the only felony I’m worried about at the moment. I’ll do whatever it takes. I thought you felt the same.”

“I’m off the books,” Alexa snapped. “That’s committed. I could lose my badge and my pension for this. Going to prison isn’t something I want to risk.”

“Mentally you aren’t off the books. I don’t have a career to worry about any longer.”

“You have a family that loves you. That’s more to lose than a career. And you don’t need a career because you have a rich wife.”

“That’s a low blow, Lex.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But you’ve been off the books more than once. This is my first time on a high wire without a safety net.”

“You want to play by the rules, you’re in the wrong game. Go call your fellow FeeBees and they’ll look up the laws for you as you go. That isn’t going to help now, and you’re about to get in my way.”

“I think you should go home,” Alexa said. “For your sake. For your family’s sake. I shouldn’t have come to you. No hard feelings, Massey. Clayton and I can handle this.”

“Are you two going to let the Dockerys find themselves? Are you going to wait to see if Peanut Smoot makes that phone call? What if he doesn’t? What if they maintain silence? What if they decide they don’t need Lucy and Elijah alive until Monday? You want to rely on Clayton Able’s connections, some computers and satellites being run by people who could care less if we succeed? You want to end your brilliant FBI career standing at two gravesides? You want to spend the rest of your life wondering what Eli Dockery would be doing at that moment if he was alive? I will go to prison to save a woman and her child. I don’t intend to ever ask myself why I didn’t do what I knew I had to do, but didn’t. Those two people are more important than the lives of everybody who is even peripherally involved in abducting them.”

“I agree, but . . .” She stared at him, uncertainly. “Bringing you in and tying your hands wasn’t fair. I am an FBI agent, and I can’t break the law, off the books or not.”

“Then get the hell out of my way.”

“I am in charge here.”

“I’ll tell you what, Lex. You’re right: Breaking laws is putting us on their level. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and put your head together with Clayton’s? Meantime, I’ll watch Click’s house while you and Clayton work on figuring out how to figure out where the Dockerys are. You guys figure it out, call me. I see anything here, like if Peanut stops by for popcorn and soft porn, I’ll call you.”

Alexa shook her head. “You’re going to do something crazy, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely not,” he said, crossing his heart. “I’ve made my speech, and I feel better and, bottom line, I agree with what you’ve said. No sense both of us sitting here in the rain.”

Sarnov and Randall left the house through the front door, ran to their car in the rain, and drove off.

“Maybe I should tail Sarnov?” Alexa said.

“He or Randall would spot you before you got three blocks,” Winter said.

“I guess.”

“Seriously, Lex. One of us should get some rest. Two hours and, if nothing happens, we’ll regroup and think this through.”

Alexa thought about it for a few seconds. “You’re on your own. But you keep me in the loop.”

Winter went to his truck. A few minutes later, when Alexa drove off, she didn’t look at Winter or wave at him.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. He had already made up his mind. No matter what Alexa said, there was no alternative to doing something crazy.