Girl of Lies (Rachel's Peril)

  On top of that, her mobile wouldn’t boot back up. The black screen mocked her repeated attempts to turn it on. She supposed the battery was dead, but now, once she found her luggage, she was going to have to find a pay phone. If such a thing even still existed.

  Finally. Ahead, near the taxi entrance, a man stood holding an iPad with the name “Andrea Thompson”displayed with glowing white letters.

  “Hello!” she called, waving to the man. He was tall, in his mid-thirties, with a blonde crew-cut and blue eyes. He didn’t look like a limo driver… he looked like a bodyguard.

  Of course, if Julia had sent him, he might well be a bodyguard.

  “I’m Andrea,” she said.

  He flashed a mouthful of glowing white teeth at her. “Nice to meet ya, Miss Thompson. I’m Dan. This way to the car… you got any luggage? Just that?”

  He reached out a hand and took her suitcase. She turned to follow him, then said, “Wait…” and walked, slowly toward the newspaper stand next to the exit.

  The Washington Post was displayed prominently, and caught her eye, because her father’s photograph was splashed across the cover. The headline was a shock. Ambassador Thompson tapped for Defense Secretary.

  She didn’t realize her father was planning to come out of retirement. And Secretary of Defense?

  The driver—Dan—paused, failing to hide his irritation. Andrea shrugged. That didn’t matter to her. And what was the idea of sending a driver to pick her up anyway? She wasn’t close to her family, but it felt awfully impersonal to send a hired driver.

  Then again, her mother was probably there, and Adelina Thompson was Queen of the impersonal.

  Andrea pulled the top paper off the stack and handed over her debit card, hoping it would work in the United States. She held her breath for a moment. It did. Then she turned and followed Dan to a black Lincoln Town Car. He opened the back door and she slid inside. The back seat was wide, leather. Cool and comfortable. A moment later the car shuddered as he tossed her bag into the trunk and closed it.

  As he slid into his seat, she said, “Do you have a USB phone charger? Mine’s dead.”

  Dan grunted, then leaned over and dug in the glove box. “I’ve got one, but the only plug is up here.”

  “Do you mind plugging this in?” she asked, and then passed her phone forward.

  “Sure.”

  A horn honked somewhere behind them. Dan glanced in the rearview mirror. For a second she thought she saw a flash of worry in his eyes, but it was gone as quick as it came. Then he looked away and put the car in gear.

  Where the car sat now, it was dim, one or more layers of road and parking deck above them. Taxicabs and shuttle buses surrounded them, the sound of horns and engines overriding everything except the occasional jet engine, the smell of diesel fumes heavy in the air. She was glad the window was up as she leaned back in her seat and said, “How long will it take to get to Bethesda from here?”

  The driver shrugged. “Depends on traffic.” He turned away from her and began to drive, turning the radio on and flooding the car with the sound of too-loud and too-excited disk jockeys.

  Andrea felt tension tighten the muscles in her neck and shoulders. At the very end of the ground transportation area stood Hairy Chest. His eyes scanned the traffic, looking for his ride. He didn’t have any bags, just a small backpack. Odd for an international flight. At least she was done with him. She leaned forward in her seat a little to look at her phone, laying on the dashboard. It hadn’t taken enough of a charge to start yet.

  Dan muttered, “Can you sit back please?” Then she jerked in her seat as he suddenly swing the car over to the curb, directly in front of Hairy Chest.

  Before she could speak or say anything, Hairy Chest opened the door and jumped into the front passenger seat. “What the hell?” she cried, reaching for the door handle.

  It pulled, but the door didn’t open. She yanked at the handle again, as Hairy Chest shouted, “Go! Go!”

  Dan, the driver, hit the gas, the car accelerating rapidly away from the airport.

  1. Sarah. April 28. 4:50 pm

  SARAH THOMPSON leaned her head against the steering wheel, trying to contain her frustration. The sound of cars and shuttle buses echoed off the roof above her, and she could smell gasoline and diesel fumes in the air. The text message from her little sister Andrea was clear enough. She was waiting at the Terminal C, near ground transportation, at the first exit from the terminal.

  That’s where Sarah was. That’s where the cop waving her on was. But Andrea was nowhere in sight.

  She double-checked her phone, and then sent a reply.

  I’m here ... where are you?

  This time there was no response at all. What now?

  Sarah had turned eighteen years old just a few weeks before, and she was a bundle of walking contradictions. Dressed in grey and black, her hair was cut off in jagged, rough edges at her collar, died black with bleached white highlights shifting as her head moved. Dark eyeliner and mascara set off pale blue eyes that scanned the terminal for her sister.

  The cop waved her on again. His face was growing tense.

  She checked her phone again. Still no answer. Had Andrea’s battery died? What the hell?

  A loud rap on the window. She jerked in her seat.

  “You can’t sit here.” The cop… actually TSA… looked cranky. His face was a little round, a little red in the cheeks. Late forties, balding, a good-sized paunch. But the gun on his hip and the badge he wore were real enough.

  Sarah rolled down the window. “I’m picking up my little sister.”

  “Go back around, and wait at the cell phone lot until she calls you.” The cop’s demeanor was agitated.

  Feeling her face flush, “She did call me. I’m confused, she says she’s at Terminal C at the first exit.”

  The cop frowned. “Well, is she?”

  Sarah shrugged. “No! I don’t understand, look, here’s the text from her.” She showed him the phone, with Andrea’s message. I am Terminal C, next to first exit.

  The cop shook his head. “She must be confused. How old is your sister?”

  “Sixteen,” Sarah responded.

  The cop frowned, looking at the text. “And when did she send you this text?”

  “Five minutes ago? I tried to call her back and she’s not answering now.”

  He stood there for a moment, as if undecided whether or not to take this seriously. Then he looked back at Sarah. “All right, I want you to pull ahead, down there to the end of the terminal so you aren’t blocking traffic. I’ll meet you there in two minutes.”

  Sarah nodded, her pulse throbbing in the arteries in her neck. She knew it was nothing. Andrea was in one of the other terminals, and her battery had died, or something else. Andrea was fine.

  But sometimes, even when you thought things were fine, they weren’t. She’d learned that the hard way. It still felt like yesterday. She’d been sitting in the back seat of Carrie’s Mercedes, arguing with Jessica, when a jeep came out of nowhere, slamming into the car. Instantly her life had changed. Everything changed. When she woke, her brother-in-law Ray was dead, killed in the accident.

  Not accident. It was murder. It took away the life of her sister’s husband. Sarah herself had nearly died, and undergone major surgeries leaving her left leg scarred with what looked like huge shoe laces running up the outside of her calf up to her thigh. She spent weeks in the hospital, months in a wheelchair, and still went to physical therapy twice a week.

  That wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the panic.

  It snuck up on her, always. She’d think about Carrie and the pregnancy, or Rachel after she was born, or her twin Jessica, and a tiny tendril of fear would work its way into her chest. Her muscles would tighten up, her breath quickening, and soon she felt as if her throat were closing and she couldn’t breathe.

  She hadn’t told anyone about the panic attacks. She hadn’t told anyone that sometimes she thought she was goin
g to die. But moments like this, her muscles would tense, and the pain in her chest would bloom like some hideous flower, and the tears would be just below the surface ready to burst. Sometimes she felt a tingling in her fingertips and in her throat, as if she’d been electrified.

  Now, she swallowed the rock in her throat as she pulled the car up to the sidewalk just past the terminal. The cop jogged over to her, then leaned in to her.

  Sarah tried to slow her breathing.

  “All right… by the way, I’m Officer Harmon. Let me get some details from you, and we’ll find your sister, okay? First, what’s her name?”

  “Andrea Thompson.”

  “Age?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Traveling alone?”

  “Yes… she flew in on, um… American Airlines flight 3663 from Madrid.”

  “Spain?”

  “Yes…”

  “Why was she traveling alone?”

  “She lives there with our grandmother… she flew in because our niece is sick… and may need bone marrow transplants. We’re all being tested.”

  The cop nodded. “I see. Description?”

  “Um… I haven’t seen her in a few months.” She felt a sharp pain in her chest as she said the words. The last time she’d seen Andrea, Sarah was still in the hospital, out of her mind with grief and morphine. “She’s um… tall. Six feet. Dark brown hair. Green eyes. Not sure what she’s wearing.”

  “All right. And she definitely got off the plane from Madrid.”

  “You saw the text,” she replied.

  Officer Harmon grimaced. “Yeah. All right, hold still, I’m calling this in. The airport will page her, and we’ll alert TSA and the police to look out for her. She’s in the airport somewhere, all right? She’s probably in the bathroom or something, and you guys will get a big laugh out of this in a few minutes. You got a picture of your sister? On your phone?”

  Sarah nodded, trying to contain the panicky feeling bubbling up in her chest. She flipped through her photos as quickly as she could, but she couldn’t find any recent pictures of Andrea. Wait. She went online. Andrea had updated her profile picture just a few days ago.

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Can you text that to me?” Officer Harmon gave her the number.

  A moment later, Harmon stepped away and began speaking rapidly into the microphone at his shoulder. She barely heard the words through the rushing sound in her ears. “White female… sixteen years old… unaccompanied minor… did not meet sister at ground transportation…”

  Sarah stared at the steering wheel. Her chest was twisting tighter and tighter, so much that she felt a sharp pain in her sternum. She put a fist to her chest, trying to breathe.

  “You all right, miss?”

  She tried to answer, but couldn’t, just nodded her head, tears welling up. In her head, the thoughts kept running through her mind. Please be okay. Please be okay. Don’t let her be hurt too.

  Hands shaking, she picked up her phone and sent another text message to Andrea.

  Call. Me. Please.

  No reply.

  Flashes of her hospitalization ran through her mind. The bizarre dreams she’d had of walking through the ghostly hospital with Ray. Waking up to find her leg cut open from ankle to thigh, swollen to triple its normal diameter, shoelace-sized sutures crisscrossed over the surgical wound, her brain fuzzy from heavy doses of morphine.

  In her dream she’d made a promise to someone. Ray? Her sisters? She couldn’t remember what the promise was, and it terrified her.

  “Miss?”

  Jerked back to the present, she looked up at Officer Harmon. “Can you come with me? One of the other officers will keep an eye on your car.”

  “Yeah,” she said. The shaking threatened to burst into the open, and the one thing she would not do, the one thing she refused to do, was give in to the slightest weakness in front of anyone else. There would be no fucking tears. No fucking shaking. No panic. No nothing.

  She opened the car door and stepped out. The cop got his first good look at her and his eyes went a little wide. She wore a grey t-shirt with the Yellowcard logo emblazoned across it. Whenever it wasn’t too cold she stuck with shorts and miniskirts, hiding none of the extensive scarring on her left leg. Right now she wore black shorts, and the crisscrossed pattern of scars on her leg stood out above her black leather combat boots.

  With one look at Sarah’s leg, Officer Harmon was thrown way off balance. In some ways, that helped her regain her own. She said, “Where to?”

  Harmon didn’t kid around. Taking long strides, he led her through the clean, well-lit terminal. She had to run to keep up, and a moment later he stopped at an unmarked door and swiped an access card.

  Behind the door was a hallway. It was utilitarian, the walls the dull beige of a public school or hospital, the floor scuffed and cracked tile. Outside was the public area, brushed with veneer of polished wood and glass, an exfoliated and cosmetic covered skin disguising an aging, sickly infrastructure the public never viewed. Inside, the debilitated condition lasted right up to the door of the security suite.

  Security, here as everywhere in the United States, was well funded, portly, even corpulent. Inside, the equipment was new and expensive, the product of more than a decade of continuous budget priority. Half a dozen uniformed TSA officers sat at desks with security camera feeds in front of them. Three large displays on the wall cycled through various security camera feeds all over the airport, and the security center as a whole had a high-tech, well funded appearance.

  A tall African American man approached her. “You’re Miss Thompson?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Lieutenant Aaron Miller. I’m with the Transportation Security Administration. I understand your sister texted you a few minutes ago?”

  Sarah nodded, fumbling with her phone, then handed it over to Miller.

  His brow furrowed, and he said, “Your sister lives in Spain? Is her English okay?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Sarah responded.

  “This text… it’s oddly worded.” He passed the phone back to her, and she read it. I am Terminal C, next to first exit. Miller was right. It was strangely worded. Not like teenaged text-speak, but like someone who didn’t know the language. She slowly nodded. “What’s going on?”

  “Just one second… we’ve got an image of her coming through Customs, can you verify it’s actually her?”

  Miller nodded to one of the cops. An image appeared on the leftmost screen. She expected the stereotypical grainy security camera image, but this was digital, in focus, and very clear.

  The image was of Andrea standing in a Customs lane, holding her passport out to the inspector. She was smiling, wearing a knit sweater that revealed one shoulder, her hair slightly longer than shoulder length. She was taller than the Customs inspector.

  “That’s her.”

  “What about this… do you recognize either of these two men?”

  On the other two screens, images appeared. In the center was a tall, well built man with short blond hair. The image was slightly blurry, but it was clear enough. He carried an iPad with her name on it, and was smiling directly at Andrea, who walked directly toward him in the photo.

  The other picture showed a man in his thirties, dark hair, shirt open halfway down his chest with extensive chest hair, getting into a black Lincoln Town Car.

  “No,” Sarah said, panic suddenly rising in her voice. “I don’t recognize those men. And I was supposed to pick her up, not some random driver.”

  Officer Harmon and Lieutenant Miller met each other’s eyes.

  “Miss Thompson, can I get your parents’ phone number?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her father would be at the Pentagon right now, or maybe on Capitol Hill, but he was at least in the same time zone. She quickly gave his number to the police, and then sank into a chair, the rushing in her ears too loud to hear much of anything else. But some words came through. AMBER Alert. Possible abduction. FB
I.

  She exhaled forcefully. She had to keep it together. She scanned the room. Miller stood there, giving orders. An officer was talking into a phone, reading the license plate of the Town Car to someone on the other end. Officer Harmon was on another phone. With her father? Maybe. She took another breath. She needed to make some calls.

  2. Andrea. April 28. 4:52 pm

  “Who are you? Where are you taking me?”

  “Shut up,” said Crew Cut. “I told you to keep your mouth shut.” Dan, he’d said. Whatever his real name was. Deep furrows on either side of his mouth marked a lifelong frown, and sweat dampened his crewcut, demonstrated his current worry.

  The clock on the dashboard showed 4:52 pm. 32 minutes had passed since they’d picked her up. Kidnapped her. Crew Cut had passed an automatic pistol to Hairy Chest moments after they left the airport. And then he held another pistol up in his right hand, displaying it for her appreciation.

  “Don’t try anything funny. I don’t much care whether you survive this or not.”

  The words sent chills down her spine, but not as much as moments later when Hairy Chest said, “Give me your purse. And your passport.”

  She had no choice. What was this? Who were these people? Terror twisted her guts when she passed the purse, with her identification and passport, over to the man in the front passenger seat. Last year she’d done a report on sex trafficking for school. And too often it happened like this. Passports and documents seized, young women carried off from airports or bus stations.

  The back door latch didn’t work; she’d tried that at the airport. Surreptitiously, she’d tried the power windows. They didn’t work either. Child-safety locks? She didn’t know. Whatever the mechanism, she was trapped in the spacious leather back seat, with two armed men in the front, in a car moving at high speed down the highway.

  She swallowed, keeping her fear in check. She needed to stay alert and pay attention to her surroundings. She’d been watching the road, a circuitous route that had taken them around Baltimore and now onto Interstate 70 West. She needed details. If she managed to get to a phone, she’d send a text message, anything. She watched the road closely.