The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (6 page)

“Or it could be that he was asked to leave with Charity and then bring Hannah back.”

“Would the leaders do that?” Munroe said. “Order him to find an opening to take her back?”

Logan shrugged. “They don’t feel society’s laws apply to them.”

Heidi said, “Their views on the children born into the group are more like property ownership. Even if they didn’t order it, even if he got the idea and planned it on his own—which we doubt—they’ve done well at protecting and hiding him ever since. That’s why it’s taken us so long to find her.”

“And now that you’ve found her?”

“We want you to get her out.”

Munroe returned the photo to the table and slowly placed Gideon’s glass back on top. She sat back and then grinned. “You want me to kidnap her.”

She’d made a statement, not asked a question, and Logan knew with certainty that she’d said it for his benefit and no one else’s. It was classic Munroe.
Have you really thought this through
?

There was silence around the table.

Munroe said, “Now that you know where she is, wouldn’t this be the time to go the legal route?”

“It’s not that simple,” Logan said.

Eli, the med student, said, “We’ve already tried that. If David returns to the U.S. he’ll be arrested. He’s also wanted by Interpol, and we figure that’s why he keeps to less-developed countries—less technology, harder to find him. But even still, none of it does any good when it comes to actually getting to Hannah.”

“And we’re trying to get to her with minimal collateral damage,” Logan added.

Munroe said, “Collateral damage?”

“We know where she is, we know the country and the city. We don’t know specifically which commune. There are at least three in the immediate area. If we get law enforcement involved, in order to find her they will raid the communes. All of the children will be taken into protective custody, and events have a way of spiraling out of control. There’s also a good chance that in the confusion we’ll lose Hannah again, especially if they’ve forged her documents using a different name.”

“Don’t misunderstand,” Heidi said. “We definitely think it’s an unhealthy environment, and it’s not that we don’t care about the other kids, but at the same time, ripping them away from the only structure they know and putting them in South American juvenile centers isn’t the solution.”

Munroe paused and then said, “I assume this has happened before?”

“Yes,” Logan said. “And then some. No matter how we may feel about The Chosen and its leaders or even about some of the individuals within it, the children are our brothers, sisters, and cousins. Right now, this is about Hannah. Charity has full legal custody, there are
warrants out for David’s arrest, and it’s just a matter of getting close enough. The cleanest way to do it is to get behind their doors.”

“None of us can do it,” Gideon said. “They know us. As soon as we get close, they’ll know what we’re doing, and they’ll move her again.”

“So what you’re saying is that in order to get her out, I’ve got to get in.”

“Pretty much.”

Munroe was silent for a moment, and Logan could see analysis written on her face.

“This happened eight years ago,” Munroe said, “so Hannah is what? Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Thirteen,” Logan said.

“In the United States, children’s passports are only good for five years, and parents have to be present in order to renew them—a situation like this, renewal in a foreign country, only one guardian who’s not even a parent—it’s going to raise serious questions. If the alerts are out, as you say they are, why hasn’t she been picked up at a consulate or embassy when her passport expired?”

“It’s happened before,” Heidi said, “with another family. So now the leaders are wise to that and won’t let it happen again. As best as we can tell, she’s no longer using an American passport, but we’re not sure which country she carries.”

“So, what you’re saying,” Munroe said, “is that for all intents and purposes, in whichever country she’s living, she’s not an American citizen.” She paused for effect. “Which means that essentially you want me, an American, to go into a foreign country, kidnap what may possibly be a citizen of that country, and bring her to the United States?”

“If you want to put it cut-and-dried like that, then yes.”

Bethany had spoken, the real estate agent, and her tone had a sarcastic edge. “We’re looking for someone who has the acting ability to get inside, the fortitude to endure it, and the skill to get her out.”

“Okay, look,” Munroe said. “Assuming that I’m capable of doing it, assuming that I even want to do it, I can see Logan’s point in all of
this—Charity being his childhood friend and his having been involved in searching for Hannah all these years. But what’s in it for the rest of you? You didn’t fly in from around the country and offer to put money in a pot just because of an arbitrary connection to a thirteen-year-old girl. Are you each related to Charity or Hannah or Logan in some way? There’s got to be more.”

“Eli is Charity’s half brother,” Logan said. “And although we each have our private reasons—certainly some of this is about us and our personal issues with the past and the people who were responsible for what happened—it’s primarily about Hannah.”

Munroe said, “Or revenge?”

Logan said, “If we want to avoid semantics entirely and call it by its most simple definition, then yes.”

She stood and said to Logan, “I need to think about it.”

After Munroe left, there was a momentary silence, and then one on top of the other the opinions and comments flowed, a mesh of conflicts and agreements that grew in volume.

“Goddamn it, Logan,” Gideon said, “the way you described her, described the plan, the whole thing seemed plausible, but seriously, who are we trying to kid? We
might
be able to get Michael in, but how the hell is she supposed to get herself, much less Hannah, out?”

“She can do it,” Logan said.

“Just because you like her and trust her doesn’t mean we do. Just because she’s willing to do the job—assuming she’s willing to do it—that doesn’t mean she
should
do it. We get one shot at this. If she screws up, it’s game over.”

“She can do it.”

“It’s not just about Hannah,” Heidi said. “You
know
that if this goes wrong, it’s going to come back to burn us.”

Logan rolled a bottle of water between his palms, then set it down on the table and stood. “Eli, how much are you putting into the pot?”

“About three grand.”

“Ruth?”

“Five.”

Bethany held up two fingers and the others did as she had, fingers speaking the words, as Logan’s eyes went from one to the other.

“That’s what? Twenty-five grand between us in order to pull this off, right? Anyone want to venture a guess on what Michael’s last contract paid out?”

Gideon said, “I dunno, fifty thousand?”

Logan paused, waited a beat, and then said, “Five million dollars.”

The table fell silent.

“Yes, Michael is my friend,” Logan said. He paced. “She’s my friend, which is the only reason this project even registers on her radar screen. Twenty-five grand won’t even cover expenses on a job like this. Michael’s not looking for crazy, she’s here because I asked her to come. If she does this, it will be for me. We can sugarcoat it as much as we like, but she’s not stupid, she’s been down this road before and knows that even the cleanest of ins comes with a complicated out.”

“How’s her Spanish?” Bethany asked.

“Last count, she spoke twenty-two languages.” Logan sat and leaned forward, elbows to knees. “I don’t know, it could be more by now. But yeah, she’s fluent.”

Bethany continued, “So, assuming she gets in and locates Hannah, assuming she’s able to get her away from the commune, does she even know what it’s like dealing with corrupt officials—and what if things go wrong and she ends up having to take the rural routes out of the country? Can she do it?”

“Let me put it this way,” Logan said. “If it came down to pulling a trigger to protect Hannah and get her safely out of the country, Michael wouldn’t hesitate.” He paused and held his hands up in a form of backed-off caution. “I’m not saying she would go in guns blazing, I’m just saying that she’s capable of doing it if necessary. And she’s spent more of her life navigating shit-hole, despot-run countries than any of us, including Gideon.”

“I have a hard time seeing it,” Gideon said.

“Hey, don’t take my word for it,” Logan said. “She’s downstairs. I dare you. I dare you to go pick a fight. No wait, you don’t even have to do that. I dare you to lay a finger on her. Touch her shoulder, grab her wrist, anything.”

“I liked her,” Ruth said, putting a pause on the tension. Ruth, the lawyer, who had until now remained silent. “She’s smart, very smart, and I think she actually gets it.”

“I’ll agree to that,” Heidi said. “She gets it. But can she do it?”

“The question is not can she do it,” Logan replied. “It’s will she do it.”

M
unroe pulled down the cap that shadowed her face, shoved her hands into the pockets of cargo pants, and with a furtive glance over her shoulder crossed the street.

Even in the early morning, that cooling time marking the close of day for some and the beginning for others, the city remained wrapped in a familiar heat, torrid and sticky. She inhaled the aroma of civilization and moved up Fifth Avenue, in the direction of Central Park, hoping against the inevitable, for an evening without mishaps.

Mishaps
. Like last night.

It would be easy to plead innocence, to say that she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, to say that it had been self-defense. But excuses were for cowards. Excuses couldn’t bring the dead to life or undo the damage wreaked by a second of instinct. Blood was blood, no matter the reason shed.

She pushed back the thoughts. It was over and couldn’t be undone.

She strode forward, one foot in front of the other, reaching the southeast corner of the park and following the illuminated paths, without regard to where she was or where she was going, focus turning from what had already transpired in this city to where she would go from here.

She was glad to have made the trip, if only to meet Logan’s friends, to hear what they had to say and from their collective stories glean a
clearer insight into Logan’s past—although she was far more familiar with his history than he gave her credit for.

How could she not be? No matter the details that he’d conveniently left out over the years, he was her best friend and, like her, had a childhood marred by trauma. With the glimpses and tidbits he’d shared, she’d done what any good informationist would do. She’d looked.

Like his friends, Logan had been birthed into The Chosen of God, a movement spawned in the late 1960s that attracted thousands of teenagers and young adults out of society, the Void, and into the arms of The Prophet, a modern-day Moses who promised to lead his people out of Egypt.

They cut ties with family and friends, severed relationships with anyone who didn’t believe as they did, creating instead a collective new family bound together by loyalty to The Prophet.

The Chosen established communes—Havens—around the globe, and like Logan’s parents, those thousands of young people birthed even more thousands of children into the life of The Prophet, separate from the outside world. There was no consideration that the children might want another path, no possibility that the world might not end in their own lifetimes, and when, like Logan, the children grew and began to leave, they were cut off, demonized, and abandoned to fend for themselves in a world they didn’t understand.

Logan’s story, like that of so many of his friends’, told of falling through the cracks of a society unaware that children like him existed, of watching many of his childhood friends succumb to drug abuse and suicide, of experiencing anxiety and stress disorders, of being clueless about social mores and customs, of fighting the prejudice and social stigma that followed, and then of clawing his way upward one exacting day at a time.

In one way or another, the stories, no matter how different or with how much levity they might be told, were still the same, and without intervention, it was this same story that little Hannah would be telling in ten years, if she was alive to tell it at all.

Munroe came to a fork in the path, flipped a mental coin, and then
left the lights and the trail for an area that promised darkness and seclusion. A breeze swept through the treetops, and the moon, ripe above them, lit the way.

She was a child of the night, and nocturnal movement was familiar and cathartic—far better than remaining inside, cooped up, unable to sleep and cautious of stanching the tide of dreams one time too many.

But letting her mind wander, seeking solitude and getting away from Logan and his friends, wasn’t the main reason for this foray into the park. She’d come here tonight because, just as had happened when she’d left the hotel the night before, she was being followed.

Her nature would have her make a game of it—keep up the guise of oblivion as long as possible for no other reason than that she could. But tonight wasn’t the night for games. She needed to bring the pieces together.

She came at last to a bench, stopped, and waited, listening to the darkness. Certain he was there, she sat and, after another moment, spoke to the shadows.

“Come and join me,” she said. “I’m tired of being stalked.”

She heard his approach before she saw him, the bulk of his outline materializing from the dark as he drew near. His stride was casual, his shoulders squared, and his hands relaxed in a summer jacket’s pockets. He stopped within a foot of her and gazed down with a subtle smirk, and she smiled in exchange.

Head tilted up and in his direction, she said, “Hello, Miles.”

He nodded, returned the smile, and with arms crossed remained standing for a moment before joining her on the bench.

Silence.

“How long have you known?” he said finally.