The only sound Mouser could hear through the phone was a ticking of clocks.
Henry said, ‘You aren’t just failing me, but failing the entire Night Road.’
Mouser didn’t care much about what other people wanted, but the rest of the Night Road could be useful to him. ‘If they will help me – I won’t fail them.’ He decided this was the most diplomatic thing he could say.
‘Then the Night Road will help you. As long as we don’t give them details on the current difficulties. I don’t want the rest of the network to panic or to decide to leave us.’ Henry was offering a truce between them; they would not alert the rest of the network to the problems they faced.
‘I agree,’ Mouser said. ‘The first step is to find a way to track Aubrey Perrault. Maybe her car has GPS. They took off on the train but she must have a car. And we need an eye inside Eric’s bank. Trace where he moved the money, because he had to have stashed it where he could get it quickly.’
A pause. ‘Luke. He was all right?’
‘I saw him running. He appeared fine.’ He shot Snow, he wanted to say, who cares how he is?
‘You didn’t hurt him.’
‘No.’ Only because I didn’t get the chance, he thought. Henry’s concern for Luke enraged him. The mission, the mission, one could not be distracted from the mission. Henry was becoming a liability. But he remained silent.
‘Oh, how was that doctor for Snow?’ Henry asked.
‘Fine. Just fine,’ Mouser said.
The elderly man stared right at Luke. Luke glanced at the grime on the window. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the old man unfold a cell phone from a pocket, dial it, and speak into it. His calm – his certainty – was somehow more frightening than if he had produced a gun or a knife.
‘We’re almost to the next station,’ Aubrey whispered in Luke’s ear. He kept his face neutral, calm, seemingly uninterested in what the elderly man was doing.
‘He’s the kid in the paper,’ the man announced to the train. He closed the cell phone. ‘The Houston kid who killed the homeless guy.’ He tapped the paper.
‘You’re nuts,’ Aubrey said. ‘Leave my brother alone.’ She was a quick liar.
‘I called the police.’ A smugness filled his voice. ‘Killed a homeless guy,’ he said to the trio of street guys.
One of the homeless men – gaunt, fortyish – reached out and grabbed Luke’s arm.
Aubrey pulled the homeless man’s arm from Luke. ‘I said to leave him alone.’
‘Don’t let them get away.’ The elderly man raised the folded paper like an accusing finger.
They all swayed as the train braked to a stop and suddenly two of the homeless men hammered Luke into the wall. They smelled of wine and of sweat fermenting too long in wool and, as the doors whooshed open, Aubrey and Luke fell out onto the platform in a tackle of legs and arms. Luke threw a hard punch, drove into the matted beard of one of the men. His fist scraped dirty teeth and rubbery lip.
Aubrey grabbed the other man’s greasy hair with a twisting yank, started to scream for help.
The other men grabbed Luke’s arms, hauled him and slammed him into a concrete column.
‘Stop it!’ Aubrey yelled.
And now the crowd moved, three young men rallying to their defense, grabbing at the ragtag accusers. Aubrey seized Luke and they ran. They stopped running at the bottom of the stairs as a policeman hurried past them.
They vanished into the mist.
25
‘Where would he have hidden the money?’ Luke and Aubrey walked the streets of a quiet neighborhood, north of downtown. Aubrey kept glancing over her shoulder. Keep moving, Luke thought. ‘He worked for a bank… wherever he put the money, he was willing to die to keep it a secret.’
‘Which means he could have hidden it anywhere,’ she said. ‘But I’m guessing he stashed it in another account, probably another bank, that wouldn’t be so obviously tied to him.’ Her voice broke. And he could sense her drawing away from him.
‘I know you cared about him. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’
‘Are you?’ She studied the sidewalk. ‘He’s the reason you’re in this mess.’
‘No. He was a pawn, just like me, just like you. Even the people chasing us aren’t much more than pawns. The king on the chessboard is my stepfather. The queen is this Jane bitch. She has to be crazy, trying to extort money from terrorists.’
‘I don’t like chess and I don’t like being a pawn.’ She raised her head, looked at him with a mix of defiance and grief. ‘It makes me mad.’
‘Mad is good. Mad might help us stay alive.’
She started to walk again and he fell in step with her. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. He was just so desperate to convince me he was on the side of right. He just kept talking about all he’d done for me, risked for me…’
‘He was leveraging your kidnapping to bring you back to him.’
She nodded in shame. ‘It sounds horrible. But he wanted us back together.’ She glanced over her shoulder again. ‘I’m really not so special. I don’t know why he couldn’t let me go.’
Luke thought of her calm, her brave pleading with Eric not to leave Luke chained to the bed, her resourcefulness in the elevated train in fending off the mob. He knew exactly why Eric would not let a woman like her go easily.
‘How did you meet him?’
‘At his bank. I set up my company accounts there, he handled them.’
He remembered Aubrey’s export/import business now, from her friend’s blog.
‘I bought an import company a few months back. From a friend. Pottery from South America, African decor and jewelry, crafts and furniture from Mexico and eastern Europe, not expensive stuff. But you have to watch your expenditure, deal with making payments overseas, receiving payments from overseas, it’s a hassle. Eric helped me sort it all out. Then he asked me out to dinner… I thought he was a good guy. I don’t often choose well.’
‘Did he have a chance to win you back after he saved you?’
‘I don’t know. I was furious with him and grateful all at once. But once I saw the footage on TV – I recognized you – I knew he was involved in killing that man. To save me. It was going to bind me to him forever and I was very afraid. Whoever’s after him isn’t going to give up.’
They passed a nearly empty diner and she glanced at the menu in the window.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. He realized he was starving but suggesting dinner seemed bizarre.
‘We never got to eat our pizza.’ Aubrey rubbed her temples. ‘I’m horrible to even think of food right now.’ Her stomach growled.
‘It’s okay. We’re in survival mode.’
‘Weird. And everything else seems so ordinary.’ She crossed her arms. ‘We’re different, the world isn’t.’
She was right; warm light filled the diner and the few customers laughed over coffee and sandwiches and daily specials. They went inside, Luke’s skin prickling at the thought of sitting still in public. They took turns going to the bathroom and washing faces and hands and Luke thought she might bolt, but when he came back to the booth she sat waiting. They ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and hot coffee, which sent a welcome jolt of heat through their bodies. She stared at the mug. ‘I should be a mess. But it’s a luxury, isn’t it, to be a mess. In the worst of times you just have to forge ahead.’
She was right. They had to keep moving, and they had to find the money quickly. ‘The luxury we don’t have is time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘These people expect this money soon. It’s tied to a bigger attack – even bigger than the bombing in Texas. Mouser referred to it as Hellfire. We have to find out what it is, and I’m guessing from Mouser’s tone that the attack is very soon. Within a couple of days.’
Aubrey said nothing for thirty seconds, frowning in thought. She waited for the waitress to refill their coffees
