This was the Regina Coyle I didn’t know — the politician’s wife. I don’t mean that in a bad way. What I really saw was a mother living through her own worst nightmare and doing whatever she could to save her children.
I set down my cup and took out a pen and a small pad from my jacket pocket.
“May I?” I asked.
“Of course,” she told me.
It was time to start from square one with the president’s wife.
“Tell me about Ethan and Zoe. What are your children like?”
THEIR HANDS WERE on the neck of the devil. Now it was time to tighten their grip.
Hala sat cross-legged with the laptop on the bed. She dragged several of the files she’d been compiling to an encrypted disk image on her desktop and reviewed its contents one more time.
Once the disk was finished, only the intended recipient would be able to open it. Every Family member assigned to Washington had his or her own unique sixteen-digit alpha-numeric string. Hala’s code had been what allowed her to access the disks she and Tariq had received up to this point.
While she worked, she kept the local news playing on the television. There was a constant stream these days: frightened faces, traffic warnings, and of course endless speculation about what might be coming next.
It was electrifying, for Hala, to be the one with the answer to that question. Uncle had entrusted her and Tariq with several key targets. Now it was up to them to decide where to strike first; pair the operatives with their assignments; and send out the orders.
Any single one of those targets could change history — much less a fast, violent run through them all. That was exactly what Hala hoped to pull off. Every American life they could take was one more step in the proper direction. There was no such thing as too much punishment for the people of America.
Or as they liked to say in this country of excess and greed: more is more.
“Hala!”
Tariq appeared suddenly in the bathroom door, dripping wet. His chubby body was drifted with mounds of soap bubbles and nothing else.
“You look ridiculous,” she said, but with a laugh. It was good to see him so at ease. He was obviously drunk on their good fortune.
“Ha-laa!” he sang out, and began a little dance for her while he was at it. “Come join me! The hot water is endless.”
“Not while I’m working, darling. And it’s Julia, remember?” she said.
“Ah, yes.” He grinned broadly. “I forgot that I’m in love with another woman.”
They were Julia and Daniel Aziz from Philadelphia now, and they had American passports to prove it. They’d arrived at the Four Seasons just the day before. Uncle called it hiding in plain sight.
The pace of all these changes was absolutely breathtaking. Only two days earlier, they’d been waiting in the dark to find out what would happen next — and now this.
After Tariq had sloshed back into the tub, Hala returned to her work. Let him enjoy this ridiculous American palace a while longer, she thought. The less he worried, the better it was for everyone. As far as Tariq was concerned, everything had changed for them.
But it hadn’t, of course. The elders were still watching. It was more important than ever that she and Tariq make a good impression, and soon. If they weren’t careful, they could become expendable to the Family just as quickly as they had risen to this position.
Be prepared to die at any time.
That, above all, remained true. Because it wasn’t just an opportunity they’d been given, Hala knew. It was also a test.
This war was now in their hands.
I CAN’T SAY I was surprised to find out that Nana Mama had forbidden Bree from bringing Ava over to Child and Family Services the next day. Never mind that I’d insisted on the trip to Family Services. Bree told me on the phone that afternoon than Nana was digging in her heels.
So I came home determined to get the situation taken care of myself.
Nana was waiting for me when I got there. I found her alone, reading Little Bee at the kitchen table, like a security guard.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“I’m not going to fight about this, Nana. We can’t help every kid on the streets of DC,” I said, and kept moving.
“Who said anything about that?” she called after me, but I was already halfway to the stairs.
I hated being cast as the bad guy. It wasn’t like I thought Nana was crazy for feeling the way she did, but I truly believed I was doing the right thing here. For everyone involved, even the girl.
At least up until what happened next.
When I got upstairs to Damon’s room, Ava was sitting on the bed reading one of his old X-Men comics.
“Ava, it’s time to go,” I said. “I’m going to bring you down to the intake center and get you settled over there, okay? Just like we talked about last night.”
She wouldn’t even look at me. She lifted and lowered one very cold shoulder and swung her feet onto the floor. Maybe she’d been getting pointers from Nana.
Then, as she got up to shuffle over to the door, I noticed something on the floor behind her. Something under the bed.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing.
“Nothin’.”
She didn’t even glance back. The girl was a terrible liar.
“Hang on a second.”
I walked over and knelt down on the rug to have a look. There, between the bed and the nightstand, was a small pile of food. I saw half a loaf of bread, some bananas, a sleeve of crackers, and a jar of peanut butter.
Honestly, I wasn’t so surprised. It’s not unusual for a kid from the streets to hoard food, given the chance. And I wasn’t even remotely mad about it, either. Ava had done this by instinct, as likely as anything. Survival instinct.
Maybe that’s why it broke my heart. Why should a thirteen-year-old kid have to think about where her next meal might be coming from?
Why should Ava? Or anyone?
Just like that, something shifted inside me. It happened the way these things do sometimes, when you least expect it — or even want it.
But that was also the moment that Ava made a break for the stairs. When I turned around, she was gone.
“Ava, wait!”
By the time I got out to the hall, she was already down by the front door, trying to get out. Our dead bolt’s a little complicated, a little tricky, and it was slowing her down.
“Ava!” I called out again.
As I came closer, she gave up and ran for the back of the house instead. She crashed right through the kitchen door and just kept going. I heard the sound of breaking glass.
Then Nana’s voice. “What in heaven’s name —?”
When I rushed into the room, Ava was still there. One of the panes in the back door was shattered, and her hand was bleeding. She stood staring at it, frozen in her tracks like a trapped animal.
I put my hands out in front of me. “It’s okay,” I said. “Really. Everything’s okay.”
Nana grabbed a dish towel to wrap the cut. She put her arm around Ava and made her sit down.
“Nothing to worry about,” she said in a soothing voice. “Just a little cut, but you go ahead and cry if you need to, sweetheart.”
“I’m sorry,” Ava said, more to Nana than to me. “I didn’t mean to …”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “It doesn’t matter about the food. The window, either. None of it matters. We’ll work it all out.”
Still, Ava tried to squirm away toward the door. She stood up again, and Nana pulled her back down with that surprising strength of hers.
“You sit down, right now!” she commanded. “You’re not going anywhere, young lady.”
I stayed where I was, giving her a little space. “You know what, Ava?” I said. “Nana’s right. We don’t have to make any decisions about this tonight.”
But in fact, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d already decided something.
Nana was right. M
aybe we couldn’t save every kid on the streets of DC, but there was no reason — no good enough reason — why we couldn’t help this one. Right here, right now. Even if it was only for a little while.
I’d call whoever I needed to in the morning. Get an expedited home check. Pull a few strings, if I had to. Make things right for this young girl.
“Just … stay,” I said. “Please.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Bree took over at home, and I was back at work. Whatever influence the First Lady had exerted on my behalf, I had no trouble getting onto the Branaff School campus — inside the gates this time.
I got there early so I could get a better feel for the place before the school day started. I wanted to retrace, as much as I possibly could, Ethan and Zoe’s footsteps on the morning they had disappeared.
As I came up the front drive toward Branaff House, the school’s Georgian-style mansion of a main building, I couldn’t help thinking about the modest charter John and Billie Sampson were trying to start up just a few miles from here. It was a world apart, that’s for sure. Branaff House was the crown jewel of an eighty-acre campus, with the kind of restored beauty that persuaded parents to part with forty-five thousand dollars a year for middle school.
It was also where the Coyle kids had last been seen. What had happened to them?
I started in the main foyer. According to the reports I’d read, this was where a fight had broken out that morning, between Zoe and Ryan Townsend.
It hadn’t lasted long, and Secret Service Agent Findlay immediately pulled both of the Coyles away from the scene and into an adjacent lecture hall.
At 8:22 a.m., Findlay had radioed his team that he was giving the kids two minutes alone to speak privately.
At 8:24, he opened the door again and found the lecture hall empty.
About ninety seconds after that, the van driven by Ray Pinkney had gone tearing off campus through the east gate — without Ethan and Zoe on board, as it turned out.
What that left was a three-and-a-half-minute window, from the last time Findlay saw the kids, until that van left the school grounds.
Somewhere in there, a kidnapping had taken place.
So what happened in those three and a half minutes?
I let myself into the lecture hall and closed the door behind me.
The room was high-ceilinged, with several austere portraits looking down from the walls. It was a little creepy, actually, but definitely imposing. It made even a big man like me feel small.
Whatever had gone down in that room, Zoe and Ethan couldn’t have been there for long. The clock was ticking on those three and a half minutes, whether they knew it or not.
There were two doors at the front, both covered by the same security camera in the hall outside. The only other possible exits were the five windows at the back.
Agent Findlay had reportedly found the center one unlatched, and I went to it now.
I hopped up on the heat register, slid open the window, and ducked outside.
It was an easy drop to the ground, landing me behind a thick tangle of lilac bushes.
Footprints found in the dirt that day confirmed that two people Ethan and Zoe’s size had come this way.
But where did they go from here? Were they still alone at this point? When exactly did things turn horribly wrong?
We had just a few facts. The rest of the scenario was mostly supposition.
But there was one other known piece of the puzzle, and I needed someone here at the school to show it to me.
GEORGE O’SHEA WAS the head of maintenance at Branaff. He was a big, redheaded fireplug of a guy, with arms that bulged against the sleeves of his uniform the same way his gut strained at the buttons in front. I found him in his basement office under the main building.
“Nice to meet’cha,” he said, half crushing my hand. “I’m guessing you came down to see the tunnel? Headmaster’s office called ahead.”
“If you have a minute,” I said.
“Come on with me. I’ll give you the nickel tour, five cents off today.”
“Much obliged. Thank you.”
There had been a lot of speculation in the press about the underground passage at Branaff, and a lot of assumptions that it figured into the kidnapping somehow. What wasn’t public knowledge was that Ethan and Zoe’s electronic locators had both been found down here, smashed to pieces at the far end of the tunnel. Whether someone had deliberately put them there to throw us off the scent or dropped them on their way through was still a question mark.
I followed O’Shea through the basement, to an old black steel door at the back. It looked original to the building, except for the brand-new hasp and padlock that had been bolted on.
The custodian used a key from his retractable ring to open it for me and then flipped a light switch just inside.
“Whole thing’s like a T,” he said, leading the way. “Straight on, it’s just a sealed-up hatch where the old coal barn used to be. But if we take a right turn up there, it comes out in the groundskeeping shed down by the playing fields.”
It was supposedly true that Noah Branaff had used this tunnel as part of the Underground Railroad, back in the nineteenth century. It had clearly been refitted since then, with riveted I-beams, a poured concrete floor, and tile on the domed ceiling. Mostly it was used for storage now.
There were mesh lockers with cleaning supplies near the entrance and gardening tools and sports equipment as we got closer to the far end. Very orderly, surprisingly clean.
O’Shea did most of the talking as we walked. He’d been with the school “since Clinton,” he told me, and had seen a lot of “big” families come through, although none bigger and more important than the Coyles.
“What’s your impression of Ethan and Zoe?” I asked. “What kind of kids are they?”
“Ethan’s a good enough egg,” he said. “Scary-smart, too. A lot of the other kids think he’s kind of weird. He got picked on some. Make that a lot.”
“What about Zoe?”
At first, he didn’t answer. He raked his fingers through his hair and seemed a little nervous about the question. “I suppose you want the truth, huh?”
“Don’t worry, Mr. O’Shea. I’m not writing any of this down,” I told him.
“All right, well … truthfully? Zoe Coyle’s a little troublemaker. Anyone who tells you she didn’t try to take advantage twenty-four/seven is either lying or kissing up. And believe me, this school is full of kiss-ups.”
“I can believe that,” I said honestly.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’ve been praying for those kids every night. But that girl’s all about seeing what she can get away with. I chased her and her little smoking friends out of here more than once. And she would give me lip.” He stopped as we came to the end of the passage. “Anyway, here we are.”
In front of us, there was a half flight of concrete steps up to another door. This was where the locators had been found, although the crime scene had been cleared days ago. There wasn’t much to see now, but I needed to walk through here at least once.
We kept going and emerged through the groundskeeping “shed,” which was about the size of my house. That put us on the school lawn next to a couple of practice fields and the south gate.
Up the hill, past a line of old bur oaks, I could see the main building we’d just left behind. Very pretty landscaping. Not the kind of scenery you associated with tragedies.
“That’s where the kids came out, supposedly,” O’Shea said, pointing up at the lecture hall windows. “I suppose that they did come out there.”
I turned in a full circle, taking it all in. Did they come this way? Were they conscious? Drugged?
“Kind of a straight line from up there, isn’t it?” the custodian said. “Right through this spot and out that gate. You suppose that’s where they took them?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. People don’t always travel in straight lines. In fact, the ones who have something to hid
e usually don’t.”
He nodded, a little like he was playing cop with me.
“Well,” he said, “you ought to know.”
I SPENT THE rest of the day talking to as many people at the Branaff School as I could. The students were strictly off-limits until I could get parental consent, so I focused on the faculty and staff for the time being.
Dale Skillings was the headmaster. He seemed pretty tightly wound to begin with, but he’d also been through the wringer in the press, and no doubt with the parents as well. Everyone wanted to know how this could possibly happen at Branaff. Inevitably, some of the blame had already landed on the headmaster’s desk. If he was terse, or defensive with me, I could understand why.
“Enemies?” he said when I asked. “They’re two of the most famous children in the world. It’s not possible to avoid some amount of animosity. But if what you’re really asking about is Zoe’s fight with Ryan Townsend, I can’t discuss that with you. You’ll have to take it up with Congressman and Mrs. Townsend.”
In fact, I already had a few calls in on that one. Skillings wasn’t going to budge on the rules where the kids were concerned, but he did make his staff fully available to me, which I appreciated.
One of the sixth-grade math teachers, Eleanor Ruff, told me about how Zoe had barely scraped by in her class and about how Ethan was testing off the charts, no surprise. She was a twenty-year veteran at the school, but her feelings were as close to the surface as anyone’s I interviewed.
“You don’t even like to imagine something like this happening,” she said. She fluttered around her classroom, watering the plants while we talked. Meanwhile, I sat uncomfortably in a student chair that was much too small for me, or even half of me. “Then one day, everything changes. I’m just glad they were taken together. At least they have each other —”
The second she said it, her hand flew up to her mouth and she burst into tears. “Oh, my God! That’s not at all what I meant. I’m so sorry!”