ColdScheme (6 page)

Ken had believed otherwise.

“If he was one of the foot soldiers with a bomb in his
chest, then he would have been given a specific assignment,” he had said.

“Exotic car dealerships—exclusively?” I had been skeptical.

“That’s the way I would run it.”

I had disagreed. “I would recruit someone I could use as a
generalist, not a specialized agent, with limited use.”

“He wasn’t an operative. He was a walking ghost. He had to
do as he was told to stay alive. This organization doesn’t recruit. It targets
those it needs to do one type of job and then takes them—for implantation.
Brick must have been kidnapped before—according to Patricia four other times,
when she had filed reports. She shouldn’t be in Mongrove. She should be an
outpatient, under a doctor’s care. She’s not crazy. We should try and help
her.”

“I’m not without compassion, Ken but we have more work than
we can handle, without her case. If it’s as you say, then Brick probably didn’t
want to cooperate.”

“Would you?”

He’d had a point. “So you figure that they had kidnapped him
when he resisted, implanted that shit into his chest and then released him?
Why?”

He had shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe to think things over,
live under such a threat for a while—reconsider.”

“He was reconsidering for a long time. Patricia filed four
missing persons reports. Why would you leave such a reluctant recruit alive?
Why not blow up his chest when it looked like he wasn’t coming around to their
way of thinking? Why keep on enticing him to visit 7-Elevens farther from his
neighborhood?”

“That may have been his own initiative.”

“Initiative for what, Ken?”

“To find out whether the device had a range.”

“Not bad. I’d go along with that. I would call that kind of
initiative suicidal but it sounds plausible. Brick didn’t want to embrace this
organization. He kept pushing the limits, testing the range, visiting 7-Elevens
farther and lingering longer…”

“Until they finally had enough and snatched him from the one
in Dundalk,” Ken finished.

“They must have really wanted him badly.”

“That’s pretty strange,” he had nodded. I thought so too.

“Why would they need an economist that badly?”

“Maybe we ought to visit the place where he worked,” he had
suggested. “It’s been four years but someone might still remember him—his
work.”

I had thought that was a good idea too.

“But why continue with the exotic car dealerships?” I had
motioned at the Washington paperwork on my desk.

“There has to be more to it than just laundering money
through five hundred thousand dollar sets of wheels but exotics is all we’ve
got for now,” Ken had said. His own pile was high, the New York part of grand
touring exotics.

“Did you get anywhere?”

“No.”

“But you still think it’s got to be exotic car dealerships.”

“Training—”

“That usually means a variety,” I interrupted.

“With focus.”

“Brick’s focus was car places?”

“Had to be.”

Something had occurred to me. “Why don’t we look through
those four missing persons reports Patricia filed? We’ve skimmed through them
and have Brick’s bare-bones bio but maybe we ought to take a closer look at
what Patti knew about him, the background information.”

I had taken Brick’s file and Patricia’s reports home. Now I
had to clear my mind of parent-child power struggles and survival issues
because I had to examine them in detail.

Slowly, not feeling motherly, I headed for my daughter’s
bedroom.

Tonight, for the first time in ten years, she had reminded
me of her father. He too was a man of action and didn’t ask me whether I wanted
to be a part of it. When I had told him I was pregnant, he’d pursed his mouth,
reflected on the “joyous” news and thirty minutes later he had dragged me into
the Moultrie Courthouse, the Marriage Bureau office, to take out a license. My
blood-work was five hours fresh—from a clinic in Georgetown that had shocked me
with the news. His was handy too. It should have raised questions but my head
was throbbing from the nasty discovery.

He had spent the five-day waiting period musing, in a
fragmented way, about our future—and our child’s. I had listened to his grand
plans. These always started on a strong note but faded when they reached his
next career step, family roots, residence, friends, associations,
organizations—social benefits and entitlements. I knew nothing about him but
what I saw. A six-foot-five muscular Smithsonian security guard, in snappy
uniform, with a well-shaped head, shaved bald. He had mellow green eyes. The
light shone through and made them sparkle even on the dullest Washington day.
It must have blinded me.

I was in my fourth year of law at the George Washington
University. I had completed the undergraduate curriculum in three years, in
residence as per requirement, with the extra help of summer clinics and
seminars. I was in my first year of advanced studies, heading for Juris Doctor
Degree. I was toiling through the Criminal Law and Procedure. My grade average
was a notch below excellence. I wanted it to stay that way. I finally believed
that the world was round and there were fragrant green meadows and spirited
brooks, not tar pits and quicksand.

I was dead wrong.

I had met Fielding Weston at the Freer Gallery of Art at the
Smithsonian, in the Peacock Room. The golden peacocks had watched us from every
square inch of the opulent sheets of bullion imbedded into the walls. He
stopped beside me. I glanced at his guard’s uniform, then at my watch,
wondering whether it was closing time. He motioned with his head at the
brilliant, blazing artwork and started to tell me the history of the dining
room that once used to be in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy
ship owner from Liverpool.

“I can read,” I had said discouragingly.

“I wasn’t testing your eyes or trying to check out your
academic credentials,” he drawled.

“Just passing time or trying to gauge my mood?”

“I’m off in half an hour. Can I buy you lunch?”

“Smooth,” I laughed.

I had let him buy me lunch, in the cafeteria, appropriately
named “Mr. Greenjeans”. It was a half-price admission day, favored by students.
Most of the crowd in the cafeteria wore jeans. The place dripped with foliage.

Two weeks later, I knew his patrol route through the gallery
as well as his supervisor. He had met my roommate. Nellie disliked him at first
sight but out of friendship let him stay overnight at our Georgetown flat.

Seven months later, with the school year drawing to a close,
I had tried to figure out a way to ask my Criminal Procedures professor if he
would let me write the exam with a tin bucket beside me, so I would not have to
rush out to throw up. This was still occupying my mind when, five days later, I
had said, “I do,” in front of the judge and signed the marriage certificate.

I could tell all of this to my daughter, in an abridged
form. It would stem her anxieties about her roots. Unfortunately, I couldn’t
say any of this without revealing something about the final ten days that had
culminated this dramatic period in my life.

Jazz was asleep, fully dressed. I turned on the little
bedside lamp and sat down on her bed. I took off her sneakers and held them for
comfort. She had the right to know. But what was I going to say when she asked
whether she was a “planned” child or an “accident”?

Her father had stayed ten more days, after the courthouse
ceremony and disappeared, never to be heard from again.

I wrote my exams. I didn’t bother to find out how I did. I
left my unfinished degree in the backseat of a limo, one last gift for my
father. I had jumped from his armored car.

In ten years I had not been so stressed as to shout at
Jazz—I, a woman who had wanted to keep her child badly enough to jump out of a
moving car while two months pregnant. That limo was heading for the Baumgartner
Clinic in Maryland. It was a posh, private facility that specialized in
discreet abortions for the filthy rich. I was forced into it, kidnapped and
under guard. It wasn’t enough to get me to Baumgartner’s. Perhaps that’s when I
decided to become a cop.

My roommate came to get me in Transgrove. Today, Nellie
Clarrington was a lawyer with the Greater Washington Board of Trade. I heard
rumors that five years down the road, she would be a good bet to run for
Congress. She was bright—and a good friend. She drove me to Baltimore, to the First
Tavistock National Bank. I withdrew all the interest I was allowed from the
trust fund left by my late mother. I knew my father would move quickly to
freeze it—and did—but too late to leave me penniless and at his mercy.

Nellie had looked after all the paperwork involved in
changing my name to Meaghan Stanton. Meaghan was my middle name. The
Smithsonian guard had called me Meg. I picked Stanton from a phone book.

“You’re giving up a lot, El,” Nellie had said with a painful
smile. I knew she meant my law studies.

“I’m used to it,” I said. She knew my tortured eighteen-year
history. We had been roommates for four years.

“Your father will track you down,” she warned.

“Not to Mexico. I’ll outrun him until my child is born. Once
that’s over, what can he do?”

“Kidnap your child.”

“What’s there to leverage me for once the child is born? He
never wanted me around when I was growing up. Why would he bother now?”

“Control.”

I shook my head. “He never had any over me for eighteen
years. I came out of the tailspin by myself. He doesn’t care where I am and
what I’m doing, as long as it’s nothing that brings shame on his name—his
tradition—public respectability. Once the media stopped flashing their cameras
at me in clubs, parties, orgies, he stopped. The news was no longer filled with
his name—the black smear had faded. I ceased to trouble him. I turned my life
around. Once that happened, he didn’t care.”

“You should have told him you were married.”

“That would have seen me in that limo even faster, along
with the new son-in-law.”

“Where do you think Field has gone?”

“According to the personnel at the Smithsonian, to a better
paying job, far away.”

“Doesn’t sound right.”

I didn’t want to believe either but I knew that if I held
hope, it would hurt that much more, when I proved to be wrong. I had asked the
human resources clerk at the gallery whether Mr. Weston had made any changes to
his marital status in his records in the last ten days, prior to his departure.
Her startled headshake was a poignant answer.

Nellie had told me that I could always count on her. I knew
she had meant it but I would never compromise her in any way. I became Meaghan
Stanton.

Three months before my twenty third-birthday, with a
nine-month-old dependent, I stood in Harris’ office, asking him for a chance to
start a new life with the Baltimore Police Department, as a cadet. A shadow
fell across his face when he examined my academic credentials, a cloud of
regret but he didn’t include the law degree and the rest of the university
documents in my file. He let me in as Meaghan Stanton. I never, not even once,
looked back—or looked over my shoulder—until my ten-year-old drove me to throw
out a People Finders’ field agent out of my house at gunpoint.

* * * * *

I wasn’t aware that all through my painful review, I had
stroked my daughter’s head. She didn’t feel it. She didn’t even stir. She had
to be tired, having cried herself to sleep. I knew that I had been walking a
minefield for ten years. How much longer could I keep up such an insane act?

I liked my job. I was good at it, especially the research.

I had tried relationships, like women try shoes on—for size.
None felt comfortable. A couple were wearable but I eventually returned them.
My heart just wasn’t in it. Now and then, Ken had tried to find out the
whereabouts of my heart. I had discouraged him with stern reminders to mind his
own business—and pursue Brenda faster.

I thought I should take another shower, to wash off the
sticky memories but two showers in two hours seemed overly clean, not to speak
of drying. I went back to my little office.

What we had discovered, going through Patricia’s reports,
was that Brick had a part-time job while in college. He was from the Midwest.
His parents were deceased but he had an aunt and uncle living in Tulsa. His undergraduate
degree came from the University of Oklahoma. He graduated in ’91 and went to
work for the Hunt Trust and Savings in Oklahoma City, doing economic forecasts.
While at Oklahoma, he supplemented his scholarships and bursaries with
part-time work—as a gun carrying, licensed security guard. He chauffeured
celebrities and dignitaries for a company that specialized in providing armored
car services. He liked this part-time job so much that he continued doing it on
weekends, when already employed at the Hunt Trust. In ’93, he went to work for
CEDA, a two-year contract in Lima, Peru. He had brushed up on Spanish and
Portuguese. According to his CEDA job satisfaction report, he had developed a
smart program for tracking tax haven criteria and policing how these were used
by the Peruvian business enterprise. He had worked for Banco Nacionale in Lima
and was well liked by the management. They gave him a glowing recommendation
and wanted him to stay. His programming skills apparently weeded out quite a
lot of harmful features of their tax regime.

Brick had returned home in ’95, to a firm job offer with the
State Department, the Bureau of Economics and Business Affairs. That’s where he
had met Patricia Vanier. He worked developing programs in the Investment Finance
Department. She was a program coordinator in Trade Policy. In ’97 he left the
Bureau and came to work for the IMF at their Baltimore offices. It was a
three-year contract job but nearly double his Bureau salary. Patricia quit her
job and accompanied him to Baltimore. They became engaged and she went to work
for the State Energy Commission. Perhaps because he planned to get married,
Brick had returned to his hobby—working part-time on weekends as a security
guard and a chauffeur, for the Creeslow Armored Security Automobile service. I
had remarked to Ken that if Brick loved this part-time job so much, he ought to
have picked it up in Washington. Ken pointed out, that in Washington it would
have been a full-time job.