Cut and Run (6 page)

Traveling through suburbia, the reminders of family and what his life might have been had he accepted Hope's invitation without second thought, forced him to call Linda, the only person in whom he'd confided this past.

Linda had been his one and only relationship in the past six years. A recently widowed wife of a dear friend of Larson's, the two had shared a brief, but emotionally charged affair nearly three years earlier. Neither had entered the bed with any expectation beyond comfort and understanding, but both came away with a confidante for life. Linda often looked after Larson's dog, Tanner, when he was away for work. He'd left her a message from New Jersey, and decided to follow up.

She screened her calls, so he had to wait for her to call him back. She never asked him where he was or what he was doing.

“Tanner's fine,” she began the call.

He thanked her for taking care of the dog on such short notice and she replied that it was no problem. She lived in a huge house with a giant backyard, a holdover from the marriage she would eventually have to part with. But not yet. They both knew she wasn't ready.

He said, “You remember that guy who I knew would know my friend's new persona?” No names. Nothing definite.

“Yeah?” She sounded worried. He'd expressed many times how pursuing this information might cost him his job.

“I'm parked around the corner from his house.”

“Well, that's news.”

“Am I crazy?”

“Of course you are. Crazy in love, right?”

“She's in danger.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't know if I'm just using this as an excuse or not, but here I am and I'm going through with it.”

“Unfinished business.”

“Exactly.”

“If I could have had even five minutes with Jack . . . Well, you've heard this enough times.”

Larson's friend had died while lecturing at a small New England college. Not for the fee, but because they'd asked. Forty-three years old. Way too early.

“I'm going to get my five minutes,” he said, although it rang of hollow confidence. His odds of tracking Hope down were limited by a very tall wall erected to prevent such contact.

“Remember, you're the one pursuing her. You've had time to process the reunion and what it means. She won't have. Don't judge her by her first reaction. Give her time to sort it out. It won't be easy on her.”

“It won't be easy on either of us.”

“I'm happy for you.”

He felt like an asshole, bringing Linda into this, rubbing her nose in his opportunity while she would have no such chance to reconnect.

He said, “If and when I find her, it may be me making the proposal this time . . .”

“I'll give Tanner a good home” was all she said.

He heard her voice tighten, could picture her at the kitchen table. He knew her patterns. He loved her as one of the good ones. They would miss each other.

“We'll see,” he said.

She told him to take care of himself, that she loved him, and as they hung up he realized how very close they'd become, how much he would miss her.

Pulling back onto the road, the trees alive with color, Larson considered the career risk he took by coming here to the man's private home. He wasn't supposed to know the identity of any of the WITSEC regional directors, much less visit one unannounced. He had no idea what repercussions he might face.

He pulled to a stop in front of an impressive, three-story Tudor. Either Sunderland or his wife came from a wealthy family, or she had a hell of a good job, because there was no way a person on Sunderland's salary could afford this place. It sported four brick chimneys, leaded glass windows, and a fully landscaped yard—more like a park—including a slate walkway that led up to an arched-top wooden door that hosted a massive wrought-iron knocker in the shape of an ivy wreath. A pair of impressive oaks shaded the front yard, their leaves rattling at Larson's feet. Intimidated by the surroundings, he rehearsed not only what to say, but how to say it.

The door opened to a young teenage girl, self-conscious and wearing braces she tried to hide by covering her mouth as she spoke. She wore hip-hugger blue jeans, and a Gap T-shirt that showed her navel. Larson wondered what it was like being her parent.

“Marley? Your dad home?” He took a risk by using her name, but thought the familiarity might soften her.

She cocked her head. Curious. “May I tell him who's asking?”

The right words. The right schools. She didn't invite him inside. She blocked the door with her foot. The right training.

“Deputy Marshal Roland Larson,” he told her, handing her his business card. “Tell him I'm with,” he spelled it, “F-A-T-F.”

“Sure. Wait here, please.”

She closed the door. For the hell of it, Larson tried the handle and found it locked. Sunderland's kids had grown up to learn the complexities of living in the same house as a regional WITSEC director. Or maybe it was just suburbia. There were only four other regional directors who knew the program as intimately as Sunderland, but it had been Sunderland who had relocated Hope from the Orchard House.

Sunderland's face and his wrinkled clothes left the impression he hadn't slept recently. A pair of smudged reading glasses hung from his neck by a thin black cord. He smelled of popcorn—or maybe that was the house itself. He had ice blue eyes that projected contempt, a Roman nose, the silver hairs of which needed trimming, a cleft chin, and awkward ears. He wore his graying hair cut like that of his fellow suburban businessmen, well in disguise. His right hand remained behind and screened by the massive door, possibly concealing a weapon.

Larson caught a reflection in the narrow side window alongside the door. Two big guys, well dressed, completely out of place on a Saturday, stood back on the sidewalk between him and his car. Deputy marshals, no doubt assigned to protect the guy who protected so many. The loss of
Laena
had shaken WITSEC to its core.

“Creds,” Sunderland ordered, fingering the business card.

Larson turned over his ID wallet, his moves slow and controlled for the sake of the two behind him. “We met once, six years ago.”

“Did we?” he asked, still studying Larson's credentials through the half reading glasses on the bridge of his nose.

“A woman witness,” Larson said, using this to jog Sunderland's memory because women were such a minority among protected witnesses. “It was a farmhouse, outside of St. Louis. You came down there to debrief her.”

Sunderland glanced over the top of his glasses. “You do look vaguely familiar.”

“Scott Rotem was in the field then. This is back before our protection squad was transferred to F-A-T-F.”

“That's a nice promotion.” He still couldn't place Larson. “Let me ask you this: my home? Are you out of your mind?” Sunderland's phone number went unpublished and was not listed anywhere in any government publication, nor on any Internet site, standard security for a WITSEC regional. The five regionals ultimately relocated all the witnesses in the program or oversaw their relocated identities. As such, the regionals were carefully protected.

“I traced you through Marley and Conner. You, or your wife, bought them each a cell phone about a year and a half ago. Marley's phone had the home address listed. It took me about thirty minutes to get it.”

Sunderland grimaced and then waved off the two guards. As he closed the door behind Larson he asked incredulously, “You found me through my kids' cell phones?”

“It's what I do for a living.”

The living room was Chippendale, handwoven area rugs, and floral arrangements that matched. Larson drank in the sweet smell of furniture polish, and the tang of ripe cheese. He heard a television running.

Sunderland led him past the kitchen, down a hallway lined with summer vacations, the television first growing louder then fading.

“Scott knows about this visit?”

“Not exactly,” Larson answered honestly.

“Fugitive Apprehension has the utmost respect of those of us in the Service, Larson, and we're all aware it's you running field operations. Rotem can be a real prick. We all know that, too. But he gets the job done. So do you, I'm told, or I wouldn't have let you past the front door.” In fact, he'd recognized Larson's name if not his face.

“How well do you know Markowitz?” Larson asked, once the study door was closed. Lived-in and somewhat disorganized, it appeared to be a maid's room he'd converted, for it was a door or two past the laundry room. It smelled of oil paint and whiskey. A partially completed, somewhat tacky landscape sat on a paint-stained wooden easel in the near corner, a canvas drop cloth beneath it.

“Calms the nerves,” Sunderland explained, catching Larson staring.

Not when you look at it,
Larson thought.

“Leo Markowitz is a brilliant designer and technician. I know him only professionally, of course, but I'm not sure there's much to Leo besides the professional. He took an unruly system for cataloging and . . . and tracking thousands of protected witnesses and . . . and created out of it not just a database, but an
encrypted database
. We paid a dozen convicted hackers to try to break
Laena
, and . . . and not one of them made it past first base. The man's a genius.”

“How many within WITSEC knew what he was doing . . . knew it was him doing it?”

“Listen, if you're going where I think you're going, we're way ahead of you. We're on it. So's Rotem. If there's a mole—WITSEC, FATF, Justice—we'll ferret him out.”

“I'm sure you will, but we're coming at this from an entirely different direction than you. You're trying to find a mole and turn him. We're trying to find Markowitz. And that means radiating out from anyone who knew his role in this and looking at their recent activities, calls, e-mails, contacts, finances. Some of the same stuff you're looking at.”

“So, I'll get you the names. We'll e-mail them to you. There are about eight people total we're looking at.”

“That'll help. Thanks.”

“Which woman?” Sunderland asked. “The farmhouse,” he reminded. “What was her primary?”

“Stevens. Hope Stevens.”

Sunderland nodded. No one forgot Hope. But as it turned out Sunderland remembered her for other reasons than Larson might have thought. “She opted out, you know?”

“I heard.” Larson took a deep breath. “I need to know what's in her WITSEC record. What someone might see if they went looking. I need to find her.”

That half-cocked, tilted head of curiosity was something his daughter had learned from him. “Have you been assigned to do so?”

Delicate territory. Larson hesitated.

“Because, I don't know if you know this or not, but Justice would do backflips to find her right now. There's a case pending. She could be . . . influential.”

“Donny Romero.”

“You're beginning to impress me, Larson.”

“Or am I pissing you off?” Larson could see it in the man's face.

Sunderland nodded behind an ironic smile. “Okay. That, too.”

“You're not going to read this in any report, but Markowitz's assistant, the one we found dead in the downstairs bathroom, was killed by the same person that attacked Hope Stevens on that bus six years ago. You remember that incident?”

“Go on.”

“I need to find her, because they'll come looking. Markowitz's assistant was either done by the same person, or a different one trained by whoever trained him, because it's a signature kill. We're never going to prove it was the Romeros, but that's not my job. And we're never going to prove this either, but Hope Stevens is at the top of the list of people they want dead. She reads about Donny's parole review and maybe she has a change of heart and comes out of the bushes. Are they going to risk that? And we have two choices: let them get her, let her be killed; or find her, lay a trap, and either arrest the killer on the way in and try to debrief him, or—and this is more to my liking—scare the shit out of him, drive him off, and hope the termite returns to the nest.” He'd surprised Sunderland with all of this. In truth, he didn't care nearly as much about tracking the killer, but he knew Sunderland would want a bigger prize than protecting an AWOL witness. “The same nest that's containing Markowitz and
Laena
, I'm guessing.”

“I told you: She opted out.”

“You placed her into the program.”

“I did. It's true.”

“You created a new life for her, a life she may still be following, using, even if under an assumed name.”

“I've put dozens—hundreds—into the program. What makes you think I'd remember this one?”

Larson had his own answer for that. He said, “When she opted out, was there any discussion, or did she just blow you off?”

Sunderland pursed his lips, studied Larson thoughtfully, and shook his head slightly. “I don't do this,” he said. “I don't know what your agenda is, Deputy Marshal, but I don't discuss protected witnesses.”

“The active list is missing. No one is protected. But what about the inactive list—those who've opted out of the program? Why do I think that those witnesses would have a list of their own?”

“Everything that's contained in
Laena
, or nearly everything, has a paper counterpart. We also have physical backups of
Laena
. All of that is being onlined as we speak. By Monday we'll be most of the way back.” His tone indicated otherwise, but Larson didn't challenge any of that. The computer backups had probably been installed by Markowitz, and if so, they might not be so easily accessed. WITSEC most certainly had paper records, but how current were they, and how easily found and organized? He thought it was probably in more of a shambles than Sunderland was letting on. A couple years into depending on computers and paperwork seemed to calcify.