"It's already done." She pulled a cell phone out of her sweater pocket, laid it in one palm on the table and kept flipping it to the other, studying it.
"I failed to ask yesterday, all things considered, where you got that," Scott said.
"It's his. He gave it to me. He called just now ... asked me to meet him. I said I would."
Scott's face flushed and he swapped gazes with Marg. He looked back at the phone again and only then started shaking his head. All he said was, "Whoa."
Shahzad reached past me, took the cell phone, and opened it. He made some passes through, obviously looking for the phone number Henry had called from.
"Well?" I said.
He laid it in front of me. "Blocked. Name only."
"Where's Hodji?" Scott said. He had Cora suddenly gripped by the arm, like she might try to get up and walk out of the house in her zombie state.
"I'll find him," Marg said, and left the room.
I picked up the phone and looked through some of its lesser-known subfiles. "I can find out the number to this phone and the number he called from. I can find out approximately how far he was from here when he made that call. Problem: There's a tracer on this phone. He'll know as soon as I do it."
"Can you do it from some other phone?" Scott asked. "Or your computer?"
"If I hack. It could take a few hours, and I'd say time is an issue," I said.
Scott turned to Cora. "What time did you tell him you would meet him?"
"In fifteen minutes."
He slumped backwards again and came forward in one motion.
"Where?"
"In the woods. Right where the main path meets with the trail off to his cabin. He was going to spot-paint the tree trunks for me the other day so I couldn't get lost again. He wants me to come out so he can show me the markings. He's obviously not aware of how much USIC knows."
"So, you told him you would come?" Scott asked.
"I thought I would lead USIC agents to him. Maybe I wouldn't even have to see him."
Scott slumped back again. "Problem: They're spread out across Griffith's Landing and Astor College. That's a twenty-minute drive in either case, not including the time they'll need to sprint to their cars. Here, it's Hodji and Marg with firearms."
Hodji's footsteps came trudging up the basement stairs after Marg called for him. Scott told him the dilemma. He looked focused but not like any bundle of raw nerves. I should have guessed.
He said, "Obviously, we're not sending Cora out there. We can wait the extra ten minutes and get USIC to nab him."
I got restless over the thought. "Ten minutes late? It could make him suspicious enough to take off."
"Or, worse, it could draw him to the house to come look for her," Scott put in. "I don't want the guy anywhere near the house."
"I can get the local police that fast," Hodji said, taking out his cell phone. He dialed Mr. Steckerman, and they only talked maybe a minute before he hung up.
"He's getting four local Port Republic cops to meet us at the water hole. They know the trails. They can be here in five minutes in an unmarked car. I'll just keep them belly down until he comes into sight."
He was wearing a gun in a shoulder holster and went to the hall to put on a jacket. I didn't feel comfortable. What if Henry had more guys with him?
He didn't seem concerned. "Marg, guard the keep. Don't draw arms with all these kids in the house unless you hear shots," Hodji said. "And Scott, you lock the door behind me. Both of you, go around now and make sure all the doors are locked, just in case. And don't, under any circumstances, let anybody in unless it's the USIC faces you know."
Scott went around checking windows and doors on the first floor after locking the door behind Hodji. Marg disappeared into her room and then went quickly down to the basement to do the same. I watched from the middle of the parlor as Hodji darted across the grass and disappeared down the trail to the pond. Shahzad had come up beside me. He was too quiet.
"I don't like this..." he said quietly.
"Why not? USIC will be here fast, and it'll be five to one until then."
"Where is Miss Rain?" he asked suddenly. We hadn't thought of that. I ran back to the TV room and whispered "whew." She was dozing on one end of the couch, and Owen was dozing on the other.
"Maybe they won't even have to know of this," Shahzad said, and we headed back to the dining room, where Scott was pacing around and Cora sat, still flipping the little phone from hand to hand. It rang suddenly. She jumped a foot, and Shahzad grabbed it from her, hit the speakerphone button, and set it in front of her. He nudged her.
"Hello?" she said. I thought she might turn to pudding, considering how bad she looked. But her voice didn't even falter, to my amazement.
"Hi. I'm a little early," the voice came through.
"Okay. I'll try to hurry."
"Don't bother. I'm here."
We all froze. We were watching the porch. The floor never creaked, but when the door from the basement swung open, we realized Henry wasn't on the porch. A tall man and a really short guy came into the hall, shutting the door behind them, which would prevent the alarm from sounding.
The tall one snapped his cell phone shut, looked at the four of us, and said, "That was easy..."
FIFTY
SCOTT EBERMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
12:13 P.M.
DINING ROOM
I DIDN'T KNOW whether Marg was alive or dead, and the thought would have to wait if I were going to keep my sanity. I got calm beyond what would be conceivably possible, watching Henry and Ibrahim Kansi come through the dining room.
I must have looked worse than I realized because he said, "Don't worry. I'm not carrying a gun." He closed the double doors and leaned against them. "I'm not a violent man." Then he laughed. "Well, put it this way. I don't like guns."
His little monkey friend walked around to me and simply said, "Excuse me," and I let him pass to the far end of the table. He had a gun sticking out the back of his jeans. I could have pulled it. Nervy guy. He was banking that we were stupid? He could have separated my face from my body before I figured out how to undo the safety lock. He stood looking at us with his arms folded across his chest, his nunchucks folded in the middle of them somehow.
"For me to have a gun would be redundant. I have him." Henry nodded down the table. "Because our dear friend Ibrahim could cause any one of the Trinity Four to hemorrhage in thirty seconds, and truth be told, we only need one of you to get hurt. Where's Cora?"
My heart didn't even lurch, though I knew it was all this weird defense mechanism my ambulance squad called CBS (calm before the storm). We'd get the calmest calls from spouses of people in coronary arrest. It's usually gone by the time we get there.
She was really calm, too. She raised her hand. The backrest of the velvet chairs came six inches above her head, and he poked his face around. "Hi there."
"Whatever drama you're creating, Henry, please just finish it before you disgust me too thoroughly and I ralph all over this table and horrify my friends."
It was her sweet voice but not her words. He sighed in fake frustration. "You cut me to the quick! I'm a man who loves beauty—under a microscope or in the world at large." He pulled something out of his pocket, and I quickly realized it was a handful of syringes. He kept pulling off red caps and tossing them in front of her on the table, but she refused to take her eyes off the pitcher of water Shahzad had left.
He put his hand on her shoulder, and that's when I stopped breathing. The needles were inches from her face. She finally turned her eyes to the side and looked away again.
"Henry. You're trying to scare people about dying when they're growing used to the idea."
"Well, you could be dead tomorrow. Scott could be dead tomorrow. I know who these other young men are, and, well, come to think of it, they could both be dead by tomorrow, too. But that's not what we want."
Tyler and Shahzad just sat there, as blank as I felt and Cora look
ed. Maybe there's a time you need to react that just doesn't work well in movies. Nobody seemed ready to scream. Maybe we'd been drugged for too long.
Henry stood up straight, took one of the needles in his right hand, and pushed the plunger slightly. Dots of liquid flashed in the air. "Watch this," he said in quiet awe. Three drops hit the table, and after a long minute, they started to sizzle. In another three seconds, the finish turned green, then white, and then the drops started to eat into the wood itself.
"You'll be able to see straight through to the floor in half an hour, and yet it won't eat through a latex hypo. It's a shame most of it's going to go to waste. I understand the USIC went ahead and made arrests today. Anyway, I don't necessarily want to waste what I have. Let me tell you why I'm here. It's not to be entertaining. Pass me a chair, please."
I passed him the one closest to me, and he set it down in front of the now-closed double doors. "I know USIC will be here in ten minutes. I also understand that they will do anything these days to prevent kids from dying. USIC has something we need desperately."
"Which is?" I found my tongue in the silence. I supposed he wanted me to.
"A friend of ours, arrested in Amarillo, Texas, last night. We need him back."
Shahzad spoke up. "American Intelligence does not make trades."
"I'm becoming a bit of a media expert. I get research grants and use the media to get more research grants. I know the media. USIC wouldn't make swaps to save anyone ... except perhaps its 'minor children.' They wouldn't want the bad press if we start sticking you with hypos and throwing you out the door. Cora's going to take pictures. For the media."
Cora's eyes moved to her camera, then back to the pitcher. She looked so out of it. I knew she was fighting the sedative Marg gave her, but added to that seemed the idea that she really didn't care. It was the first jolt of fear I felt. If he couldn't get a rise out of her, I was afraid he'd lose all his charm.
"The bad news is that for USIC to know we're serious, we need to throw somebody out the door. Somebody's got to be sacrificed. And it's our order of business, because it needs to be done anyway. Which one of you is the Kid?"
Tyler and Shahzad looked at Henry. My heart turned to sludge. Your CBS only lasts for so long, and then you start losing it.
Tyler slowly raised his hand and said, "I am."
FIFTY-ONE
SCOTT EBERMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
12:18 P.M.
DINING ROOM
I SHOOK MY HEAD ever so slightly as Shahzad watched me, afraid if he confessed, the two men would get angrier. It felt like walking on a thread to keep them amused.
"Good," Henry said. "You're not going to waste our time. I like that."
"Where's Marg?" I couldn't help asking.
"I didn't shoot her full of FireFall, if that's what you're thinking. Though I don't know why not. She never liked me. She liked you more. Mr. Don Juan. Seems to me you'd be every parent's nightmare." He shot a glance at the back of Cora's chair and smiled. "I know all about the Trinity Four. And it's more than just your daily vitals, blood counts, and medications. After I wrote the grant, I went all out. I got curious. Did you know that on Sandy Copeland's blog, she writes that when she found out she was number nineteen, she got disgusted and broke up with you? What were you up to before we put you out of commission two years later?"
I'd never known why Sandy broke up with me. It was sudden. "We've all got our issues," I mumbled, then couldn't help looking him up and down with his fistful of hypos and adding, "don't we?"
He exchanged glances with Kansi, who looked suddenly more tense, and Henry shook his head. I brought one of my hands up to my lip and pinched it, knowing not to push my luck one hair farther. I thought of the goat and monkey corpses.
"In our strict culture, Mr. Eberman, you would be considered some sort of a freak. A miscreant, tainted and unfit for marriage."
I wondered if I was supposed to feel bad about that. I noticed that the doors behind Henry didn't quite meet up and that a tiny ray of sun shone through the slit. I was off to the side and figured Kansi had a better view than I did, but I watched it helplessly, thinking if USIC came back and was sneaking around, I would see breaks in the sunlight. It was all I could think to do. That, and focus on something Alan had told me back in March after the raid and the arrests. He said, "It's nothing like James Bond. They're more human than you think. They make mistakes. They always make mistakes."
"It's okay," Henry said. "Honestly, I found my situation with Cora close to unbearable. I just hated sitting on the bed with her, touching her hair, smelling her sweet smell. It made her seem almost human. And she's not, you know."
Cora's eyes closed, but she didn't move otherwise.
"A bunch of my friends and I, in college in Hamburg, we knew a woman like you, Cora. Obviously, we never touched her. We called her the Vergewaltigung."
Shahzad's eyes rose to her and widened. He knew a lot of languages...
Henry went on, "Cora's e-mails indicate she's trying to figure out who her father is. Maybe one of these days she can narrow it down to one of sixteen or so Iraqi soldiers. Terrible, isn't it? To have a gang rape for a father? Isn't that rather like being an incest baby? My god. How can you walk about with your head so high? How is it you put on so many airs, Cora? What do you have to be so proud of?"
"My mother," she muttered, and watched the air like maybe she was hearing things again. She sat up and said in a nervy, loud voice not her own, "I haven't heard you say where you really come from, Henry. Maybe you'd care to share with everyone whatever ... glorious lineage you're referring to."
Gang rape baby? For later. Now I wanted to stuff my fist in her mouth. I had gone quickly from thinking she should try to get a rise out of him to thinking maybe she should keep quiet because she would piss him off. But he merely smiled and waved down Kansi, who tensed, dying to strike.
"I'm exempt," he said. "I am sent from the Father Above."
I didn't consider myself a religious person, but there is something paralyzing about hearing a line like that from a guy like this. I swallowed metallic spit as my soul collided with my brother's.
Shahzad swallowed likewise and muttered into the table, "Das ist Amerika, wo Sie sind willkommen, auch wenn Ihr Vater ist ein hippo."
Henry turned to them and spat out in a taunting whisper, "Ja. Deshalb nennen wir es der Hund Haus. Die Grube der Mischlinge." Then he looked at his watch. "I had forgotten about you two. You're not nearly as interesting, are you? You're a write-off, a failed experiment of Omar's before he decided to listen to me. Scott, go get your brother and the Steckerman girl."
He must have sensed the "go to hell" wafting off of me.
"We only need one body, but we need everyone in one place. Sick kids fall asleep, sick kids wake up. I don't need them running around the house screaming in panic while I'm trying to kill people. Go. Don't make me angry."
I moved through the kitchen and felt Kansi following me, leaving Tyler, Shahzad, and Cora with one guy who held six syringes and maybe had a gun under his jacket. It was humiliating. I went into the TV room and found the window was wide open, the screen punched out. The room was empty. The remotes lay in the middle of the couch. Kansi checked behind the couches and the drapes.
"They must have heard you and taken off," I said. Not as stupid as you thought, you little ape.
He touched my arm to pull me back, and that sent me into a deeper level of calm, equal to how bad I should have wanted to kill him. I didn't try anything.
"They're outside," Kansi said as we returned.
"Ah. Our guys in the brush need hostages, too. That works well."
They're hostages. My brother will never live through this. Think of it later.
He pulled a flat-bottomed beaker out of his pocket and with the hand holding the hypos, used his fingers to get the top off. Too much self-control. He set it in front of Tyler. "FireFall is a terrible way to go. This is not. Drink it."
S
hahzad gazed at me again and I shook my head, looking to the floor. What Tyler had done was noble, but what was done was done. We needed to keep Henry seated. If the beaker got anywhere close to Tyler's mouth, I was diving for Henry.
Tyler's CBS was still with him for some reason. I glanced over my shoulder for something to hurl—not that we had a chance. The swinging door to the kitchen was still open, and I could see a carton of a dozen or so cans of organic tomato paste, but we'd all be dead by the time I reached and heaved even one. And I hadn't pitched in baseball since I was twelve.
Tyler stuck his head down to the beaker and smelled it. Ballsy, ballsy. "Smells lousy. What is it?"
"Just drink it."
"What if I don't want to?"
"You will. If you don't, I'll stick Cora with one of these."
Henry didn't even move to Cora, didn't hold it to her throat. His confidence stunned me more than his threats did. We couldn't rush him, not considering he was holding something more lethal than a gun. Kansi swung his nunchuks once, which I supposed meant he'd come after me as well, and then they disappeared into his crossed arms again. The whir-spit-whir sound caught Tyler's attention. He looked at me, then at the beaker, and I could see the terror written all over his face.
"Don't waste our time. You're supposed to be dead anyway." Henry was leaning back in his chair, the top still caught up under the door handles, not looking the least bit nervous. "I'm counting backwards for you. Ten. Nine. Eight."
Tyler pulled his sense of humor out of his ass. "Can I say grace?"
"You may not. Seven. Six."
"That's a terrible thing. Maybe you're not the only religious guy in this room."
"Five. Four."
"Thanks, God. Amen..."
"Three—"
The rest happened so fast, yet it left an eternity of flash images in my mind. A bang! drew my eyes to Kansi, who dropped his nunchucks and gripped his chest as blood poured through it. Tyler and Shahzad flew under the table, yanking Cora down with them, and Kansi staggered toward Henry, reaching him at the same time my brother did. I dove for Kansi and took him to the floor. I didn't have to hold him down for more than a few seconds. He went limp and was, I presumed, dead, leaving me to stare at my brother, frozen with horror.