Finding North (19 page)

“
You think that someone
took him for the house?” Jesse asked.

“
It was probably an
overzealous realtor,” Alex signed.

Jesse laughed. Alex
smiled.

“
There’s something there,
isn’t there?” Jesse asked. “On the tape. That’s why you’re here
talking to me.”

Alex nodded.

“
I think so,” Alex
said.

“
Alex?” Colin’s voice came
from the door. “Are you okay?”

“
I’ll be right out,” Alex
said. She got up and left the stall. She stopped to wash her hands.
To the woman standing at the sinks, she said, “Sorry, my brother’s
an asshole.”

The woman raised her
eyebrows as if that were obvious.

“
Sorry to be concerned,”
Colin played along.

Alex smiled and followed
him into the hallway.

“
What happened?” Colin
asked under his breath.

“
I’ve seen that kind of
capture before,” Alex said.

“
And?” Colin
asked.

“
Let’s just say it doesn’t
end well.”

Raz and Joseph stood when
Alex approached. Raz helped her with her chair. They were just
getting settled when the waitress brought their dinner. Alex looked
down at her steak and pushed the plate away from her. Raz noted her
movement and reached for her hand under the table.

“
What did you see?” Joseph
asked. “I know you saw something.”

“
Romulus,” Alex said in a
low tone.

“
Romulus?” Joseph asked.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

Raising her eyebrows, Alex
bit her lip and nodded. Joseph leaned over to her.

“
Jesse
shot
him,” Joseph said. “Seven years
ago.”

Alex nodded.

“
He thinks it’s a
copycat,” Alex said.

“
Jesse?” Joseph asked. He
took a bite of his steak and chewed for a moment. “We need to
check . . .”

“
Exactly,” Alex
said.

“
What’s a Romulus?” Colin
leaned in to ask in a low tone.

“
Romulus was one of the
world’s most notorious kidnappers,” Raz said in the same
conspiratorial tone. “Born to a missionary couple in the Congo, he
kidnapped people all over the globe. He held no allegiance to
anyone, so he kidnapped individuals without regard for country,
creed, or people. He received close to a billion dollars in ransom,
usually paid in gold, and murdered or left for dead every single
person he kidnapped. He was a threat the Fey Special Forces Team
eliminated.”

“
He was a major threat to
royalty,” Alex said. She gestured with her hands to keep the
conversation quiet.

“
He never took one,
though,” Joseph said.

“
Not for lack of trying,”
Alex said. “He’d space out his work. Years would go by before he’d
strike. That’s what made him so successful. In the intervening
time, people would forget that he existed, forget that he was evil.
He’d snatch someone, and the family would pay. Every
time.”

“
How’d you catch him?”
Colin asked.

“
He was one of the first
people we dealt with,” Alex said. “We’d tracked down a two-year-old
case. The youngest daughter of some friends of Charlie’s wife,
Charlene, had been kidnapped from a resort vacation in Spain. Over
the course of two years, the kidnapper would give them details or
an article of clothing in return for a large cash payment. We found
her decaying body one week after the family had made such a
payment. The kidnapper vanished. No physical evidence. He was like
a ghost. A few years later, he struck again.”

“
And then again,” Joseph
said. “Each time, we got closer to catching him. You see, he’d
counted on pitting agencies against each other. That’s what had
worked so brilliantly for him. He didn’t expect one
hostage-retrieval team with jurisdiction over the entire globe. By
being one team, we were able to track him, wherever he went, around
the world. We caught him because he didn’t expect us.”

“
We were very close the
second time,” Alex said. “When he kidnapped that girl in Singapore,
we bagged him before he had time to murder her.”

“
Bagged, tagged, and sent
to Langley,” Joseph said. “There’ve been no reports of him or this
kind of activity since then.”

“
Is it possible that he’s
been licking his wounds this whole time?” Raz asked.

“
I doubt it,” Alex
said.

“
The time period is longer
than any break he’d ever taken,” Joseph said. “Plus, he’d be in his
eighties by now.”

“
Close to ninety,” Alex
said. “To our knowledge, he had no children.”

“
So, what are we dealing
with?” Colin asked.

This kind of “cut to the
chase” questioning technique was one that Alex had taught Colin.
Alex gave him a bright smile. He nodded in
acknowledgement.

“
A copycat,” Alex
said.

“
Someone knows we’re
watching,” Joseph said.

“
Not necessarily,” Colin
said. “If it’s a copycat, they might have just read about this
notorious kidnapper on the Internet and decided to emulate
him.”

“
Anyone who knew the story
well wouldn’t pretend to be Romulus in front of the two of you,”
Raz said.

“
What’s that mean?” Colin
asked.

“
Let’s just say the Fey
Special Forces Team stalked the man, cut off access to his money,
eliminated his ability to get around, and then got rid of him,” Raz
said. “With extreme prejudice.”

“
Not extreme,” Alex said.
“If you’d ever talked to any of the families of the people he took,
you’d know that we were way too kind to him. He was a monster. He’d
string families along for years.”

“
And all that time, their
loved one was dead,” Joseph said. “Alex is right. He was a monster.
After all the money, energy, and time, he’d refuse to tell the
family where to find the bodies.”

“
That’s what we did,” Alex
said. “We found the bodies and brought them home.”

“
You found them,” Joseph
said.

“
It’s something I helped
with when we started working together,” Raz nodded. “We found the
last body a year or so before the assault.”

“
We need to check the tape
for Romulus’s details — stuff only we know,” Joseph
said.

“
Even if it’s a copycat,”
Alex said, “it doesn’t change the outcome.”

“
Dex is dead,” Raz
said.

“
I’m sorry,” Alex
said.

Raz nodded. She squeezed
his hand.

“
What if no one knows
you’re here?” Colin said. “I mean, we’ve been looking at the
‘things’ and information we need to collect to resolve
this . . . situation. What if the truth is that only
you, Alex, can sort out what’s going on because you’re the only one
who remembers all the details of all of the cases you guys did? I
mean, the files are gone.”

“
You mean it’s more than
Linear A,” Alex said.

“
Linear A is a part of it,
sure,” Colin said, “but this is more about what you guys did as a
team, all that you did, connected with . . .
something else.”

“
That’s why it’s
personal,” Joseph said. “Only Alex can put it together.”

The men looked at Alex,
who shrugged.

“
Why did Charlie delete
all the electronic files?” Raz asked.

“
That was me,” Joseph
said. “I was afraid that the files would bring more harm than
good.”

“
And what did it matter?”
Alex asked. “The hostages were home. Cases closed.”

“
US government policy
states that the US government doesn’t compromise or negotiate,”
Joseph said. “We compromised and negotiated a lot. It would be
quite a scandal if that information got out.”

“
That’s what Charlie
said,” Alex said.

“
It is what he said,” Raz
said. “But I wonder why
you
think he deleted everything?”

“
What do you think?” Colin
asked Raz.

“
I don’t know,” Raz said.
“I have this weird, kind of glimmer of a thought — something like,
there’s a detail, a shadow, a something that exists across a bunch
of cases, that you missed in the constant press of having to work
case after case. After Joseph was on leave, Charlie saw it. He
realized that, if other people saw that you missed this thing, it
would sully the work of the Fey Special Forces Team.”

Alex and Joseph looked at
Raz and then at each other.

“
Anything is possible,”
Joseph said.

“
How do we find this
‘something’?” Colin asked.

“
We look at the cases the
Boy Scout was interested in,” Alex nodded.

“
Do you know what those
were?” Colin asked.

“
I do,” Raz
said.

“
You do?” Alex asked. She
looked at him and blushed.

“
Of course,” he said and
stroked her cheek. She leaned into him. He put his arm around her
and kissed her hair. To Joseph and Colin, he said, “I’ve been
working with MI-6 to determine how we can deal with the Boy
Scout.”

“
And the cuddle?” Colin
asked.

“
They need to look like a
couple having a romantic dinner, Colin,” Joseph said. “Breaks the
tension.”

“
Just horrifying,” Colin
said. He pointed to Alex’s plate. “Are you eating that?”

Alex shook her head. Colin
took her plate, and started to eat.

“
Why is it horrifying?”
Joseph asked.

“
All the signals are
wrong.” Colin waved at Raz and Alex with his fork. “You can’t
tell . . .”

“
All the signals are
wrong,” Alex said. She sat up straight. “Raz, do you have the key
Dex gave you?”

“
Yes,” Raz
said.

“
Joseph, call the team,”
Alex said. “Have them meet us at the Zeno estate.”

“
Yes, sir,” Joseph said as
he stood up.

“
Major?” Alex
asked.

“
Sir?”

“
Fully loaded,” Alex
said.

“
Yes, sir,” Joseph
said.

Joseph put his phone to
his ear and walked out of the restaurant. Raz signaled their
waiter.

“
What just happened?”
Colin asked.

“
I just realized our
signals are wrong,” Alex said. “We’re waiting for the NYPD and the
FBI; they’re probably waiting for us. In the meantime, we think
Romulus took Dex . . .”

“
It’s all a ploy to keep
us away from Dex’s house,” Raz nodded.

“
Right,” Alex
said.

Raz paid the bill, and
they left the steak house. They were on the street when Colin
started to laugh.

“
What?” Alex
asked.

“
I’m so glad I’m not a
school teacher anymore,” Colin said.

Raz put his arm around
Alex, and they laughed.

F

Chapter
Fifteen

Tuesday night

May 17 — 8:23 p.m.
EDT

New York City, New
York

Alex stood under a
surveillance camera in the alley along the east side of Dex’s home.
From where she stood, she could see the sixteen-point compass rose
with the eye over a side door to Dex’s home. The team, including
Matthew, who’d arrived an hour ago, had rolled up to the house
wearing fatigues, helmets, boots, and carrying weapons. Colin and
Raz were out front while Alex waited in the alley. The hope was
that the team would engage the NYPD, which would bring the FBI and
chaos. While NYPD and FBI argued in front, she, Raz, Colin, and the
team could use his key to get inside the house.

“
Hmpt,” a woman’s voice
came from Alex’s right. She looked down the alley to see Rosa
Williams, the police detective they’d dealt with before. “I said to
myself, ‘I bet they’re trying to get in the back.’ I told my
partner that, but . . . And looky here. You’re
trying to get in the back.”

She nodded. Alex pointed
to the surveillance camera above her head. Detective Williams
looked up and scowled. She stepped beside Alex.

“
That’s new,” Detective
Williams said.

“
Yours?” Alex
asked.

Detective Williams shook
her head. Alex shrugged.

“
What ’chu waitin’ for?”
Detective Williams asked.

Alex put her fingers to
her lips and pointed up. Detective Williams nodded. They waited in
silence for ten more minutes. Detective Williams shifted as if to
say something when Max walked down the alley from the south end. He
had a Belgian Malinois with him and walked at a casual pace. He
looked like a man out walking his dog.

“
Whoa,” Detective Williams
said.

Max nodded to Alex and
kept walking toward the front of Dex’s home.