‘Slow slicing is a form of execution developed by the Chinese,’ the Clouzot woman said, reaching into her pocket. ‘You use a knife to cut away portions of the body over a long period of time. It’s death by a thousand cuts.’
‘I… I can’t…’
‘Can’t what, Mrs Herrera?’
‘I can’t go through with this.’
The Clouzot woman placed the wrinkled snapshot of Rico on Barry’s stomach.
‘You have fifty-three seconds left to make your decision, Mrs Herrera.’
‘I want to help you,’ Theresa said. ‘Please, let me help you.’
‘Forty-nine seconds.’
Barry was screaming, thrashing.
‘We can come to some sort of… accommodation,’ Theresa said. ‘Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about how I can help — ’
‘Forty-three seconds.’
Theresa saw her son’s frightened gaze staring up from the photograph lying on Barry’s stomach, and she saw her son staring at her from the photographs on the walls and bureau — Rico as a baby and as a toddler, each picture showing a boy with a round, brown face and a mop of unruly black hair; a gap-toothed smile and, along the right temple, a strawberry-coloured birthmark the size of a dime.
‘Thirty-nine seconds, Mrs Herrera.’
She stared at the photograph on Barry’s stomach. Rico was alive. Her son’s life depended on her next decision — a horribly cruel, life-altering decision.
Was her husband’s life worth it?
Don’t let them take me back there, Rico had said.
‘Thirty-seven seconds.’
I can’t take it any more. Please, Mom. Please help me.
Theresa grabbed the heavy cook’s knife.
Barry screamed from behind the tape. He screamed and thrashed, the rope cutting deeper into his skin. Blood trickled down his wrists.
‘You have twenty-two seconds left.’
God forgive me, Theresa thought, turning the knife in her hands, just as a pair of car headlights flashed across the drawn blinds.
5
Malcolm Fletcher parked the Audi at the bottom of the long driveway leading up to an impressive brick-faced Colonial, the home of Dr Bernard Herrera and his wife, Theresa. It was a few minutes past seven, and a light snow had started to fall.
The lights in one of the upstairs rooms winked off. The other windows blazed with light, but he couldn’t see inside. The blinds on the windows facing the street had been drawn.
He wondered why. There was no house across the road. Each home in this upscale neighbourhood here in Applewood, Colorado, had been set up on a good amount of acreage, far apart from one another to give the owners a great deal of privacy. Fletcher killed the engine and picked up the leather Dopp kit from the passenger seat.
While he felt reasonably confident that neither Dr Herrera nor his wife would recognize him, Fletcher still needed to exercise caution. With Bin Laden dead, Fletcher had shot to the top slot as the nation’s Most Wanted Fugitive — and the most expensive. The reward for his capture was three million dollars.
Fletcher had not undergone any cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. Instead, he relied on the tradecraft he’d learned while employed as a federal agent. From the Dopp kit he removed a plastic case holding a pair of blue-tinted contact lenses. Because he was allergic to the materials used to manufacture lenses, he always put them in at the last minute. Then he put on a pair of glasses with tortoiseshell frames.
He checked his appearance in the rearview mirror. His beard was neatly trimmed and his black hair, thick and long, had grown out over the ears. For the past five months he had been living in Key West under one of his aliases and his skin was brown from the sun. With his tan, stylish glasses and coloured contacts, he bore no resemblance to his fugitive photos.
He was, however, the spitting image of the New York licence and passport photographs he carried for Richard Munchel, a self-employed computer-security consultant who occasionally performed work for the global security company Karim Enterprises. Ali Karim had contacted him using the anonymous and encrypted email system they had set up.
Karim had recently agreed to look into the abduction of a ten-year-old boy from Colorado. Four years had passed with no developments reported by the police, and the mother believed her son was still alive. Karim thought that Fletcher’s prior experience as a profiler for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit might possibly uncover a new investigative thread to explore, an overlooked angle or piece of evidence. Fletcher agreed, and Karim scanned and then emailed the police reports. Karim, an old friend and trusted ally, had not only provided him with safe harbour on many occasions over the years; he was also one of a handful of people who knew the truth behind Fletcher’s fugitive status.
Years ago, while employed as a federal agent, Fletcher had uncovered a classified ‘black book’ research project involving the Behavioral Analysis Unit. While conducting his own covert investigation, three men were dispatched to his home to make him and the evidence disappear. Fletcher escaped with his life but not the evidence; the FBI had confiscated it from his storage facility. The research project was quickly dismantled, the hospitals shut down, every scrap of paper and piece of evidence collected and destroyed. The FBI’s bureaucratic powers, having decided he was a liability, fabricated a story for the press: Malcolm Fletcher had attacked and killed three federal agents who had been sent to his home to arrest him in connection with the murders of several serial killers — cases he had worked on while employed as a profiler.
Fletcher climbed out of the car, pleased to be wearing a suit after these longs months spent under the hot Florida sun. He was a veteran of private schools, where ties and jackets were required, and then later, as a federal agent, he had grown accustomed to good suits and shoes. They were a part of his true identity, the last vestiges of the life he had led before becoming a wanted man.
His attention turned to the area between the right side of the house and the detached two-car garage — the place where someone had used an outside ladder to climb up to the first-floor window and abduct Rico Herrera from his bed. The intruder had not left behind any fingerprints or trace evidence, but police had recovered a man’s size- nine trainer impression from the dirt.
Fletcher shut the car door and moved up the driveway.
6
When the Clouzot woman saw the headlights flash across the closed blinds, she shut off the bedroom lights. Theresa didn’t put up a fight when the woman grabbed her arm and, with a surprising strength, marched her swiftly across the room to the windows facing the street.
Theresa was standing there now, with her face mashed against the window’s crown moulding and the gun’s muzzle digging into her left temple, Clouzot behind her. As instructed, Theresa had pulled back the side of the wooden blinds just enough to allow Clouzot to see the driveway.
Theresa could see too. The man who stepped out of the black Audi had long, dark hair and wore a dark overcoat. This has to be the man Ali Karim said would be coming by tonight to talk about Rico, she thought. The man experienced in abduction cases.
Clouzot leaned in closer. ‘Who is he, and what is he doing here?’
So Barry hadn’t told her about the investigator — or Ali Karim.
