Tiger (4 page)

“I had all my contacts in there!”

“Your father pays the bill for that phone, right?”

Reluctantly, Kyle nodded. “Yes.”

“Security pros don't need to tail people the old-fashioned way—it's too easy to just track cell signals and keep their distance. That phone was burned. When you replace it, you can never use the new SIM to call any of your usual contacts. Use only VOIP or pay phones if you don't want your father to be able to find you.”

The certainty of her orders left no room for argument. For his part, Kyle seemed to be struggling to come to grips with what had just happened.

“Okay,” he said, sounding exhausted. “I understand.”

The cab turned south, headed for the Williamsburg Bridge and Wally's loft in Greenpoint. They traveled in silence, and within just a few minutes Kyle was asleep, his head slumped against the door of the taxi.

Passing streetlamps cast flashes of light into the back of the cab and gave Wally brief, intermittent looks at Kyle's face; she'd never seen him at peace, and the transformation was disarming. Without the anger and confusion of his waking mind he looked like the guy that he still was: handsome and unspoiled, completely vulnerable, his mouth relaxed and parted just enough for a stray lock from his shaggy hair to find that place and remain there, stirring slightly with every exhalation of his breath.

It was almost five in the morning when they finally reached Wally's apartment. She put Kyle in her bedroom, and he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Wally grabbed a blanket and lay down on her couch, but soon it was obvious that she wouldn't be able to sleep—the adrenaline from the fight was still surging through her system.

Wally got up and sat down at her laptop again. First, she checked the TIGER TRAP program—hoping against hope that Tiger had reached out to her—but there was no sign of that. Tiger had thoroughly broken the connection between them, and apparently he wanted to keep it that way. Wally experienced a stab of hurt and resentment. It made her glad that Kyle was there to give her something else to focus on.

Wally felt a need to do something productive, and now that she knew Kyle's last name—Townsend—she could begin investigating his case. She was still certain that he was nowhere near ready to be reunited with his lost birth mother, but there was nothing to stop Wally from trying to locate her anyway. Her first step would be to find out as much as she could about Kyle's father. Using all the Ursula Society's online resources—some of them legal, some not, including a hacked database at a major credit-rating company—Wally dove in, and within an hour had put together a good-sized dossier on the man.

His name was Richard Townsend. It turned out Townsend was the CEO of MVI—Millennia Vision Incorporated—a privately held company with headquarters in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A three-year-old article in the Financial section of the
New York Times
listed Townsend and MVI as the winners of a federal contract to produce “technology related to international border surveillance.” If the man was a dangerous criminal, as Kyle had suggested, then it was impossible to tell on the surface—the law-enforcement databases revealed no “wants” or warrants or ongoing cases involving Townsend.

The search was only able to come up with one clear photo of Richard Townsend, wearing a tuxedo for a benefit at the Met, four years before. He was a large, physically fit man, barrel-chested with thick gray hair and weathered skin. His cool, somber gaze was directed at the camera, and it appeared as if the photographer had intruded on his privacy.

As for Kyle's birth mother, the situation was discouraging: seventeen years earlier, the Rutland County Clerk's office in Fair Haven, Vermont, had filed two documents: First was a birth certificate for Kyle John Townsend, listing someone named Mercy Smith as the birth mother and Richard Townsend as the father. The second document was an agreement signed by Mercy Smith relinquishing all custody of baby Kyle to Richard Townsend.

It was gratifying for Wally to find an answer for Kyle so easily, but that feeling didn't last long. Wally ran a quick check for Mercy Smith and soon found that the name appeared to be an alias, with no other mentions in the database before or since. On a hunch, Wally ran a check on the doctor who supposedly delivered Kyle. The doctor had, interestingly, died in nearby Rutland, Vermont, a year and a half before Kyle was born. Obviously, any documents with his name on them had been forged.

The result was that Richard Townsend had sole legal custody of baby Kyle, with no obvious way of identifying the birth mother. Wally figured Townsend must have paid off the mother, or somehow made sure that she would get lost and never show up again. It was a dirty mess, and it told Wally a lot about what kind of person Richard Townsend was.

Wally's eyelids began to sag just as the first sign of morning light appeared to the east—she hadn't slept in twenty-four hours, and her head felt so heavy that she couldn't hold it up anymore. She shut her laptop and curled into the cushions of her sofa. In the final, bleary moments before she nodded off, Wally wished for sleep without dreams.

TIGER SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF THE STOLEN SEDAN, watching the bank.

He felt uneasy—distracted by the clumsy, accidental way he had made contact with Wally the night before. Seven, maybe eight times he had risked everything to find scraps of information about his sister, but why? He owed her nothing, and as far as he was concerned she didn't owe him anything either—they were strangers to each other, two distant, frayed ends of a rotten, corrupt lineage, with nothing between them but a shared legacy of betrayal and pain.

Tiger promised himself that he would not reach out to Wally again.

“Go minus two,” Rachel said from the front passenger seat as she checked the time on her cell phone. Though she was barely twenty years old, her voice carried the authority of someone much more experienced—someone like her father, Archer Divine, who had trained her. Rachel's short brown hair was tied back to keep it out of her way, and the wiry, muscular physique she worked so hard to build seemed pumped and almost vibrating underneath her tight black T-shirt.

When they hit the bank, Rachel would become
Sally
. Within this crew, Tiger was always
Joe
. The driver was
Steve
, and sitting beside Tiger in the backseat was
Robbie
, both of them temporary residents of Archer Divine's “Ranch,” as Tiger was. He didn't know their real names and never would.

A pretty girl emerged through the glass door of the bank—what was she, sixteen? Maybe seventeen, like Tiger? She had fresh skin and shiny, shoulder-length blond hair and was wearing a bright red-and-white cheerleader's uniform. In this outfit—Tiger knew from American movies he had seen—she and her friends would dance and shout on the sidelines during sporting events, cheering for a pack of teenage boys on the field who had no idea how lucky they were.

“Go minus one,” said Rachel.

As the cheerleader strolled down the sidewalk, graceful and carefree, Tiger wondered what it would be like to know this girl in real life, to call her up casually in the evening and talk about the class they were in together, to joke about the laughable awkwardness of the math teacher. Tiger would eventually find the courage to ask the girl out on a date, and he imagined the simple thrill of hearing her say “yes.”

Skaska
. Paradise.

“Is that what you like, Joe?” Rachel asked. “Soft and pretty, for a rough boy?”

Tiger looked into the rearview mirror and met her stony gaze. Tiger had been at the Ranch only two weeks when Rachel had come to his room late one night, half drunk. She was strong and aggressive and hungry, but there was something missing in her. The experience had left Tiger feeling cold and empty, lonelier even than when he had the cot to himself. After than night, Tiger had refused Rachel's continued advances. The rejection had left a mark on her, and every interaction between them since then was tainted with her resentment.

Rachel's glance dropped back to her cell phone, checking the time again.

“Now,” she said.

They pulled ski masks over their heads as Steve hit the accelerator and drove straight ahead, skidding to a stop in front of the bank. Rachel, Robbie, and Tiger slid out the passenger-side doors and sprinted into the bank, breezing past the startled locals of the small New England town.

The customers and employees of the bank watched in horror and confusion as the crew streamed into the bank, the barrels of their MP-
5
machine guns held high.

“Everybody down on the floor!” Rachel shouted at the horrified customers and bank employees. “Anyone moves, they get a bullet in the head!”

The soft, middle-aged guard just inside the door made a fumbling attempt to reach for his gun before the butt of Robbie's MP-
5
came down on the man's head and dropped him to the floor. The guard's handgun skidded along the floor and came to rest at Tiger's feet. Tiger grabbed the gun and covertly stuck it under his belt, hiding it beneath his jacket.

“I said DOWN NOW!” Rachel shouted again, rage in her voice.

The rest of customers and employees hurried onto the cold floor, lying facedown. Rachel leapt behind the counter and found the tall, lanky bank manager, hauling him through the door of the open vault to the safe-deposit boxes.

“Ninety seconds!” Robbie said loudly enough for Rachel to hear from the vault. That was how long it would take the local deputies—both of them now eating a late breakfast at a diner at the far end of town—to respond to the call.

Tiger and Robbie stood watch by the door as the sound of hammering echoed into the bank from the vault area—Rachel was targeting a specific safe-deposit box. Tiger didn't care. Not knowing the full details of any specific job was just fine with him; he could play his part like the professional he was, easy in and easy out.

“Sixty seconds!”

One minute and they would be heading away from town and back to the Ranch. Everything was under control—until suddenly, it wasn't.

The front door of the bank swung open—just six feet from Tiger—and the red-and-white cheerleader stepped into the bank.
Shit
. Why was she back, and why hadn't the door been locked? It was the simplest thing—one brief action in the routine to reach out and throw the bolt. Had it been his job? No . . . he was certain it was Robbie's.

The girl was sending a text on her cell phone as she entered, her eyes looking down at the display screen until she was three steps inside the door. Then she froze, her terrified gaze fixed on the barrel of Tiger's gun, his sights locked onto her.

Tiger needed to take the shot, but instead his eyes met hers. He hesitated.

“Your shot!” Robbie said.

In that instant, the cheerleader spun on her heels and bolted straight back for the door. Tiger tracked her, but before he could get her in his sights she was gone, out the door and racing up the street, hollering for help.

“What the fuck, Joe?” Robbie said, staring at Tiger in bewilderment.

Tiger had no answer.

Now the fallen guard—still bleeding heavily—lunged toward Robbie with a knife in his hand. Where had the weapon come from? He slashed at Robbie's leg, slicing deep into his thigh. Robbie howled in pain and dropped to the floor, arterial blood splashing out and mingling with the guard's own sticky red pool.

“
Mother fucker!
” Robbie roared through gritted teeth. He pointed his gun at the guard and fired a quick barrage into the man's chest, killing him instantly. A few of the customers and employees began weeping as blood continued to gush from Robbie's leg.

Femoral artery
, Tiger thought. Nothing to be done.
Shit
.

“Sally! We're RED!” Tiger shouted, and Rachel quickly appeared from the rear of the bank.

“What the hell . . . ?” she said, furious at the sight of Robbie bleeding out on the bank floor and the dead guard beside him.

“We're burned,” Tiger answered.

Rachel stepped halfway out the door. She looked up the street and spotted the cheerleader, half a block away now and still screaming. The other locals on the street were all crouched down now—hiding in doorways or behind parked cars—their eyes on the bank door and on Rachel.

“Shit!” Rachel hissed.

Rachel turned her gun on Robbie and shot one clean round into his head, to a chorus of more wailing from the employees and customers, their sounds of fear reverberating off the cold, hard floor.

“We have company,” Tiger said. A state trooper's cruiser had pulled up to the curb across the street. A fresh-faced young trooper climbed out of the driver's seat, his gun drawn and his eyes on the bank.

“Go,” Rachel said.

Tiger raised his gun and strafed the windows at the front of the bank with a long autoblast from his MP-
5
, bringing down the entire front wall in an exploding shower of broken glass. His gun still blazing, Tiger sped out and onto the street with Rachel following behind him. The young deputy—petrified—scurried for cover.

As they ran across the street toward their waiting car, Tiger continued strafing the entire street with autoblasts, aiming high but sending a message to anyone within a two-hundred-yard radius that they should be smart and stay down. Rachel joined in with her gun as well, the storm of bullets ripping through cars and storefronts. Tiger spotted a parked pickup truck with an auxiliary diesel tank in its bed—a quick blast from his weapon exploded the tank, creating a deafening fireball.

Tiger and Rachel reached the stolen car at the curb, where Steve waited behind the wheel with an angry and bewildered look on his face.

“What went down?!” Steve said.

“Shut up and drive,” commanded Rachel, and Steve did, peeling away from the curb and immediately steering toward a side street, the first leg of an escape route out of town that had been planned weeks earlier.

Through the rear window of the car, Tiger took one last look up the street, where the locals were already beginning to poke their heads up and converge on the scene of the heist. Far up the street—at least two hundred yards away, Tiger spotted the red-and-white cheerleader.

The girl was still running.

They dumped and burned the stolen car in a ravine a few miles to the north, then walked a mile overland to the interstate truck stop where they had parked the SUV.

It was nearly dark when they arrived at the Ranch. It was an old, seven-story brick warehouse at the edge of a vast oil-storage facility in New Jersey, just a short boat ride across Upper Bay to Manhattan. The lower windows of the warehouse were boarded up, with motion-sensitive security cameras mounted high up at every corner. Its parking lot was surrounded on all sides by a twelve-foot-high fence. Four feet of razor-sharp concertina wire ran along the top.

The motorized gate rolled open and Steve pulled the SUV inside. The parking area was large and filled with several vehicles, including a red Cadillac SUV and a gray Humvee. A basketball hoop stood at one corner.

“We'll debrief tomorrow.” Rachel's tone was curt as they stepped out of the SUV, and she addressed Tiger. “My father will want to hear it all.”

Tiger glanced up to the windows on the sixth floor of the warehouse and saw the figure of Archer Divine himself silhouetted in the window, the glow of a cigarette in his hand. The psychic weight of Divine's disappointment radiated downward upon them.

Tiger climbed the inside staircase to his room on the third floor. His area consisted of a vast, musty storage room, unfurnished except for a small woodstove that vented through an air shaft, a single bed, an old sofa, and a folding card table with a radio, a desk lamp, and a small collection of books resting on it. Some cardboard file boxes that held Tiger's few possessions were stacked by the bed. One wall of the room—the south side—was almost entirely comprised of windows, dirty and yellowed. The air was thick with a musty, oily smell, residue from the heavy machines that had once been bolted to the floor but had been gone for decades.

Tiger found a loose brick in the north wall and pulled the bank guard's gun out from under his jacket, sliding it into the empty space before replacing the brick. Tiger was not a prisoner on the Ranch—not exactly—but he and the other tenants were required to follow a strict set of rules: no leaving the Ranch except on sanctioned missions, no communication at all with the outside world, no computer access, and no personal weapons of any kind.

The stated penalty for breaking the rules was banishment from the Ranch with total loss of earnings—no matter how much had been accumulated. Tiger's theory, however, was that the punishment was more final. As far as he could tell, no “banished” men were ever seen or heard from again. Would Divine let a disgruntled former worker out loose into the world, with inside knowledge of the Ranch's activities to trade on the open market? Not possible.

Tiger lit a fire in the woodstove and lay back on his bed. He was restless, his mind flooded with images of the day: Robbie lying on the bank floor, blood spilling from him. The terror in the cheerleader's eyes when she looked down the barrel of his weapon. The image of the girl escaping, running hard up the street and not looking back.

The memory troubled him. He would not make the same mistake again.

Tiger eventually slept, waking in the darkness of very early morning. The clock on his radio read
3
:
20
A.M.
He remembered the promise he'd made to himself the day before—that he would abandon any ideas of nurturing the vague, irrational connection he still felt toward his sister—but once again he felt powerless to resist the impulse. Tiger got up, dressed, and opened a window, stepping out onto the creaky, rusty, old fire escape. He quietly made his way upward, climbing the fire escape two steps at a time.

He reached the sixth floor and pried one of the casement windows open, stepping carefully into the Ranch's “operations center,” a large, open, and high-ceilinged room that included a kitchen-and-dining area, a communal lounge with a big-screen TV, a tall gun vault—locked, of course—and a row of locked offices at the inside wall. Tiger crossed the floor slowly and quietly, avoiding loose floorboards on his way to Archer Divine's office. Seven seconds of work with his lock pick and Tiger was in the room, waiting for Divine's personal computer to boot up.