The Stranger Beside You (17 page)

McFadden was filled with dread.  “Who are you?  What do you want?”

“The next few minutes are very important to your future.  Choose your words carefully,” Mr. Z advised.

“What do you want?”  McFadden felt swelling at the back of his head where the intruder in his office had struck him. 

“Tell me where Tom Nelson hid the money.”

McFadden was very much aware in that moment that this would not end well.  They were looking for stolen money, but there was nothing to give them.  Tom had died before he could finish whatever it was he’d started.  The millions were still safe and sound, locked away in a digital fortress on Wall Street.  Tom had stolen nothing, but if Aaron failed to produce what these people wanted, they would kill him.  He was certain of it.  The second thing he was certain of was that there was no way he could give them what they were after.  All he could do was try to buy some time.   The one thing he couldn’t afford to tell them was the truth.  

“It’s complicated,” he managed to say.

 “Walk me through it.”

The sound of their voices echoed in the cavernous space.

“The money was divided into dozens of accounts around the world.”  McFadden struggled for breath.  He hoped the lie might be working. 

“How much?”

“Millions of dollars.  But I wasn’t a part of it, at least not in the beginning.  But Tom made some mistakes and I was able to catch on to what he was doing.  Then the FBI got involved.  I wasn’t particularly happy about that, but that’s part of our security system.  The computer calls home and notifies the federal authorities.”

“They were watching him?”

“Yes, but they never knew the whole story.”

“When did you get involved?”

“A few weeks ago,” McFadden lied.  “Tom came to me.  He knew the feds were circling and he believed I could help, so he offered me half the money if I would manipulate the numbers and find a way to dig him out of the mess he’d made.”

“What happened?”

“I did what I could.”

“Did you recover the money?”

McFadden shook his head.  “No.  Not a dime.  It’s still out there.”  His pulse was racing, a lump in his throat.

Mr. Z folded his arms over his chest.  “Can you get to it?”

“Eventually, but right now the feds are still circling.  It’s too dangerous.”

“I think you are lying.”

McFadden felt a chill.  “No way.  I have nothing to gain from lying to you.”

“You saw Tom with a woman in Toronto?”

McFadden went silent for a beat.  How much did these people know?

“Yes,” he answered.

“Do you know who that woman was?”

“No.”

Mr. Z studied his physical reaction, the tone of his response.  “Had you seen her before?”

“No.”

“I need to know that you are telling me the truth.  This is important.”

“I swear, I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’ll give you one more chance to tell me where to find the money.”

McFadden’s mind raced.  “There is only one person who would know for sure, the one person Tom would have trusted with those account numbers,” he said at last.

“Who?”

“His wife.”

“Are you sure?”

“Let me down and I’ll prove it.”

Mr. Z lowered the light to his side and turned to Woz.  “He’s lying.  Take him down and cut him to pieces.”

•  •  •

The basement was a converted workspace with unpainted cinderblock walls and a ceiling made up of exposed floor joists and ductwork.  There were no windows.  Marcus had put in a crude desk constructed of sheets of plywood ripped in half on a table saw. 

Sadie came down the stairs.  “Brynn was attacked,” she said.

He stared at her without blinking.

“Do you think it was them?” she asked.

Marcus nodded.  “We knew this day would come.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Tom and I prepared for this.”

“I’m scared.”

“There’s no time to be scared.”

She paced nervously.  She didn’t know what to do with her hands.  The kids were upstairs watching
Monsters Inc
. on the TV in the family room. 

“Brynn is terrified.  I could hear it in her voice.  And she’s confused,” she said.  She lowered her eyes to the floor, her gaze absently tracking a hairline crack in the cement slab.  When she spoke next, her voice was timid and slightly raspy.  “She has no idea that you were involved in any of this.”

Marcus had a backpack unzipped and open on the makeshift desk.  He was stuffing it with equipment and supplies.  She watched him load a gun with bullets. He chambered a round.  She hated seeing him with it, and yet the sight of the weapon was reassuring. 

“Are you going to use that?”

He set the safety and stuffed the gun inside the pack without looking at her.  “If I have to.”

She took a deep breath and shook her head.  “How did this happen to us?”

“You know exactly how it happened.  You were there.”

“This isn’t what I expected.”

Her turned and glared at her.  “Not what you expected?  We were warned what could happen, and now it’s happening.  Stop living in fantasyland.  This is the real world, and we will have to do whatever it takes to survive.  You’d better get that through your pretty little head, and you’d better do it right now.”

She was such a sexy woman, he thought, looking at her.  Even in that moment with such uncertainty ahead of them, he could barely stand to take his eyes off of her.  A brief silence lingered between them and then it passed.  He winked at her and the tension lifted.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.  “Get up there and lock all the windows and doors.  Close the blinds and drapes.  Get the kids dressed and ready to roll.  Be calm and cool about it.  Don’t freak them out.  They’ll have a million questions, so make something up.  Bring them down here and keep them quiet.  Be quick about it, we leave in ten minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace safe.  Someplace Mr. Z and his men can’t find us.”

A few minutes later he heard Sadie and the children coming down the stairs.  There was no mistaking the fear and confusion in their eyes.

“Let’s go,” he said.

 Below the stairs in the basement was a small door that opened into the crawl space beneath the house.  He pushed the backpack through ahead of him, and then entered headfirst.  The crawl space was pitch black and smelled of plumbing and dirt.  He held a slim flashlight in his teeth and crawled with the pack to the west end of the house.  The ground sloped gradually upward.  When he reached the wall he found an aluminum louver that the builders had inserted to help let the heat escape during the summer months.  The louver was held in place by a handful of flat-head screws.  Marcus used a small tool to twist them out of the aluminum frame.  They dropped one by one to the dirt.  The vent came loose without a struggle and he gingerly lowered it down and balanced it against the wall. 

He turned off the flashlight and again went through headfirst.

It was a painfully tight fit.  He dropped onto the grass outside and then helped the children through.

“No talking,” Marcus whispered.  “Hold hands and stay together.”

He shouldered the pack and they drifted through shadows to the fence at the property line at the back of the house.  The fence was chain-link and he had already forged an opening using wire cutters.  The opening was made of two vertical cuts in the chain-link.  He lifted the crude flap in the fence and gestured for them to go through the hole.  Sadie went first, scooting on her belly in the dark, careful to keep her head low and away from the jagged barbs where the chain-link had been cut.  She popped up on the other side, brushed off the back of her legs and nodded at her husband.  Marcus watched the kids go under one at a time.  Sadie gathered them on the other side.  Marcus was the last one through. 

“Stay right behind me,” he whispered.  

They followed a narrow trail through the trees, moving through nearly pitch-blackness.  The moon and its light were totally blotted out by the leafy canopy above.  The trail meandered through deep shadow and overgrowth over uneven ground.

“I’m scared,” one of the younger boys said.

“You are all being very brave,” Sadie assured the children, bringing up the rear.

“Where are we going?” another small voice asked.

“Just keep moving,” Marcus said.  Navigating blindly was disorienting, but he was determined to not use the flashlight for fear they would be spotted.

 “This is scary,” Ashton whispered, clinging to his brother’s hand.

The trail widened into a small clearing and Marcus stopped and glanced around. It had been several weeks since his last trek through these woods during the planning stages when he and Tom had choreographed this emergency escape.

“Are we lost?” Marcus Jr. asked.

“Shhhhh!” Marcus hissed.

He started them in one direction then abruptly paused, making a slight correction in course.  Soon the surroundings began to once again take on a familiar feel.  In the darkness the journey seemed unending, branches reaching out and clawing, the trail twisting through the brush, loose rocks and exposed roots underfoot. 

They came to the edge of a much larger clearing where a new subdivision was apparently underway, the land having been razed in preparation for development.  A road had been put in, unpaved and utilitarian at this stage of construction and a bulldozer sat idle, its tracks caked with hardened mud.  It didn’t appear that any work had been done in months.  Perhaps the state of the economy had brought progress to a sudden screeching halt.  Marcus led them past the dozer and over the crude road as they hurried toward the opposite side of the clearing.

Fifty into the woods a minivan was tucked out of view in the trees, hidden from sight by camouflage netting and loose branches. 

“Give me a hand with these branches,” he said to his wife.

The children watched in silence, faces dappled in moonlight.

“Stand clear until I get this thing out of the trees,” Marcus instructed.

Sadie ushered them safely out of the way. 

The engine started on the second try and Marcus flicked on the headlights.  He eased down on the gas but the tires spun in the leaves.  He slipped the transmission into low gear and touched the pedal again.  This time he gained enough traction to back slowly into the clearing.  He left it running and helped Sadie load the kids.  Within minutes they were passing through town, Marcus obsessively watching the mirrors.  He was confident that no one had followed or seen them leave.  It appeared they had made a clean getaway.

28

Special Agent Price exited 26 Federal Plaza and followed the route Tom Nelson had taken on his escape attempt.  He had read and reread Special Agent Welsh’s report a dozen times and something about it didn’t add up. 

He went down into the subway station where Nelson had fled.  Welsh’s report had painted a clear picture.  Welsh and the cop had pursued Nelson into the subway, shots were fired, and Nelson jumped onto the tracks and attempted to flee into the dark tunnel.  Then the train hit him.

Price had seen the body, or what was left of it, when the crime scene techs collected and bagged the scattered remains.  But still, something didn’t ring true.  Price paced the length of the platform.  He ran through the sequence of events in his mind and pictured Nelson running for his life, hurtling the turnstile, sprinting down the platform, ducking as Welsh’s gun blasts echoed off the tiled walls like cannon fire.  He paused, crouching to study the yellow paint at the edge of the platform then turned his head toward the darkened mouth of the tunnel.  He could envision the train thundering out, its lights appearing suddenly through the gloom.  In Welsh’s report the train conductor swore he never saw Nelson. 

Price walked to where the platform ended at the tunnel.  Florescent bulbs flickered and hummed overhead.  He clutched at the wall with one hand and leaned out with a flashlight.  He directed the narrow white beam down a short length of track.  The iron rails sparkled. 

He heard someone cough.  A homeless man was camped against a wall, mumbling in his sleep.  Price stared at him.  He spotted a second bum huddled under the stairs, clutching what appeared to be a bottle of whiskey.  Price sneered, then turned back to the tracks.   

He remembered the sight of Daphne Fleming the morning they pulled her bloated body from the river.  It had been his job to watch her, his assignment from Mr. Z to tail her every move, but somehow she had wound up in the river with a bullet in her brain.

Why had Tom Nelson killed her?  The question plagued him.  It didn’t add up.  He glanced again at the bum under the stairs then walked the length of the platform and crouched at the edge of the shadows.  A pair of white eyes stared back at him.  Price noted the half-empty bottle of Scotch whiskey. 

“Where did you get that?”

The white eyes blinked.  They belonged to a dark black face with a billowing white beard.

“I asked you a question.  Where did you get the whiskey?”

“It’s mine, man.  Leave me alone.”

“That bottle looks brand new.  You steal it?”

“No way man.”

Price squinted to read the label.  Wild Turkey.

“That’s a twenty-dollar whiskey.”

“So.”

“So, you didn’t pay for it.”

“What’s it to you, man?”

“Who gave you the money?”

The man’s eyes glanced away.  Price could smell him. 

“Tell me who gave you the money.”

“Why should I?  What’s in it for me?”

Price produced a twenty-dollar bill.  He folded it in half and waved it in front of his face.  “You tell me, and I pay for the next bottle.  You could have quite a drunk going.”

The bum licked his lips.  “It was a cop like you.”

“A cop gave you twenty bucks?”

The bum nodded.  “Yeah, man.”

“Why would a cop give you twenty bucks?”

“To keep my mouth shut.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because of what I saw.”

“What did you see?”

“You’re one of them, man.  You should know.”