Hard Road (10 page)

The officer nodded to the driver and they drove off, taking a right at a set of lights.

Reznick let out a long sigh at the close call. If the cop had stopped the car, he'd have had had to take the cop down. Not ideal in any circumstances. He walked on for a few minutes, before he headed down a side street and founds his way back to the parking garage. He popped open the trunk and Luntz was breathing hard. Reznick untied him and undid the gag. “Let me out of here,” Luntz said, sweat beading his forehead. “Please don't lock me in there again.”

Reznick stared down at the blinking, terrified scientist. “It all depends if you behave yourself. Do you understand?”

Luntz blinked away more tears and nodded.

Reznick yanked Luntz out of the trunk by his T-shirt and stood him up. He looked unsteady on his feet. “You OK?”

Luntz shook his head. “No, I'm not OK.” He was breathing hard, eyes glazed.

“Do what I say, and we're gonna get through this, do you understand?”

Luntz stared blankly at him but said nothing.

“OK, let's go,” said Reznick, and marched him across the concrete second floor parking garage towards a Volvo.

“Please, where are you taking me? Please, I'm scared. I'm scared you're taking me somewhere to kill me.”

“That's not gonna happen. Just trust me.” Using a high tech fob, Reznick disabled the alarm and the immobiliser system. Then he opened the passenger seat and strapped a disorientated and blinking Luntz in. “Don't move a fucking muscle.”

Reznick went around and opened the driver's door. Pulling out a knife, he bent down and popped the plastic cover around the steering wheel. On the left hand side was the ignition. He got out his Swiss army knife, unscrewed the two bolts that held a metal cover in place, and jammed the smallest knife into the slot. The engine purred into life.

He slid into the driver's seat, pulled on his seat belt and revved up the engine a couple of times.

Where to now? Should he follow up the Magruder lead to the town of Weston on the off chance of getting lucky?

His thoughts turned to Magruder's name. Unusual. Rare, even. So, how many Magruders could there be in a provincial town in south Florida?

Reznick pulled the iPhone out of his back pocket and punched in 4-1-1 for directory assistance.

“Good morning, what number are you looking for?” a woman's voice said.

“Hi, looking for a number in Weston, Florida. Is there any for Magruder?”

“How are you spelling that, sir?”

“Magruder. M-a-g-r-u-d-e-r.”

“Hold the line, sir.” Vivaldi's Four Seasons started playing for what seemed like an eternity. It was probably only a couple of seconds. Eventually the woman came back on the line. “Yes, sir, I've got one in the town of Weston, Florida.”

“One number, that's great.”

“Yeah, we've got a Shelley Anne Magruder, 2387 Lake Boulevard, Weston. Number is 954-384-7272.”

He ended the call as he made a mental note of the address and number. He buckled up, switched on the satnav and punched in the town of Weston as the destination.

The woman's voice on the satnav directed him out of Fort Lauderdale, onto the I-95 ramp towards Miami and the Port Everglades Expressway towards Weston.

Reznick screwed up his tired eyes, dazzled by the oncoming lights. His mind drifted. He thought back to his daughter playing in the rock pools as a little girl, down in the cove on the rocky Maine headland. She was paying the price for his life in the shadows. He willed himself to focus.

He needed to slow down his thought processes to prepare properly. The adrenaline rush that was making him nauseous would eventually burn off. But until then, he needed to focus.

He cranked up the air con and the blast of cold air began to refresh him. Then he switched on the radio and some country station was playing.

He turned it up and his mind flashed back to the first time he'd met Magruder.

It was a cold spring day in 1995; snow still on the ground, during the Selection and Assessment for the 1
st
Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta – in Camp Dawson, West Virginia. It started with the same bullshit eight-hour standardised psychological tests. Do you like brunettes? Do you have black, tarry stools? Do you think people are talking about you? Do you hear voices? On the whole, do people understand you? Do you think of yourself as a serious person? Are you introspective? That kind of lame pseudo psychobabble talk.

They wanted to screen out the crazies. But they must have been asking the wrong questions that spring morning.

Magruder, a tall wiry man, was clean gone. He also had insane amounts of nervous energy. He stood out as an obsessive, even amongst the obsessives of Delta. He had a stellar reputation for marksmanship even amongst the Delta crack shots, and practiced religiously. He attended shooting competitions across America and beat everyone out of sight. He'd practiced magazine change and dry firing, time after time. And he'd read his Operator's Training Course manual, religiously keeping abreast of tradecraft and explosives. Everything was an opportunity to improve. To get better. He carried more weight in his rucksack; he studied martial arts to the highest level, beating the shit out of some of the best fighters in America.

But what no one knew at the time was that Magruder was damaged. Unlike Reznick, who had enjoyed a typical outdoor childhood in Maine – hiking, hunting and fishing with his dad – Magruder had endured a torrid, violent childhood. His father, a trucker, had physically abused him for years. Beatings bordering on torture, which initially toughened him up, had then sent Magruder spiraling into his own dark hell.

Whilst other Delta guys drank like maniacs when off duty, Magruder, who wasn't married and lived alone in a trailer, had been content to nurse a bottle of beer for hours and then retire quietly for the night.

He didn't talk about sex at all and seemed embarrassed as Delta watched porn, drank beer and talked about women.

Then, in the mid-1990s, a succession of violent rapes occurred in Raleigh, including at North Carolina State University, by what police thought was a lone stranger. The hooded man had climbed into their windows, dressed in black, and at knifepoint raped the women.

Police arrested Chad Magruder who was reported to have been deferential to the detectives when he was charged with three counts of rape. He was convicted and most people, including Reznick, who'd read about the case in the newspapers, had thought the key would have been thrown away.

The truly terrifying thing was no one ever thought Magruder was mad. A bit quiet, obsessive sure, but one of them.

“Why are we heading in this direction?”

“Never you mind. Look, I don't want to hear any more from you. I'm having a really bad day.”

“Please, can't you just drop me off and let me go?”

“Knock it off and we'll get on a whole lot better.”

Reznick let out a long yawn and popped two more Dexedrine, washed them down with a can of Coke. He began to feel more switched on. Alert.

Up ahead a sign for Weston. With six miles to go, Reznick's thoughts again turned to Lauren.

Where the hell was his girl? Who the hell had her?

He thought back to when she was a baby, cradling her in his arms at the hospital. The smile on her tiny, pink face as she stared up at him: her protector, her father. The way Elisabeth had held her in her arms, then broke down and pulled Reznick towards them both; a family.

Reznick felt a rising anger within him. He thought of Magruder again and what his role was.

Up ahead, the turn-off sign for Weston. He headed into the town, past silent lakes, surrounded by million dollar homes.

The satnav guided him down a dark and near-deserted street towards a huge house overlooking the lake, partially hidden behind a trim hedge. Blinds drawn. The number 2387 on the gate, a metallic silver Mercedes convertible in the drive. But no sign of the black SUV caught on cameras outside the Monterey Club.

He stopped outside for a few moments.

A police patrol car came into sight at the far end of the lake.

Reznick drove on as the police passed in the opposite direction. Neither of the two officers glanced out of their window. He drove on for another half mile before he turned around and headed back towards the house.

He pulled up behind a BMW, about a hundred yards away from the house, but with line of sight to the front door and asphalt driveway. Then he switched off the engine and lights, before letting out a long sigh.

“Why are we stopping here?” Luntz said.

Reznick turned and sprayed the sleeping spray into Luntz's ear for a second. A moment later, Luntz's eyes rolled back in his head.

He was out cold, leaving Reznick to focus on the Magruder house.

SEVEN

Fifteen miles southwest of Baltimore, Thomas Wesley was driving past block after block of soulless glass and steel towers in a sprawling business park. His nighttime drives were becoming a routine, killing time until he returned to his job as a night shelf-stacker at Walmart. He yawned and checked the luminous orange clock on his dashboard that showed 3.47am, thirteen minutes until he was due back. It had only been three months since he'd taken the minimum wage job. But already the mind-numbing hellishness coupled with the small talk of his coworkers about reality TV shows he didn't watch and fad diets of film stars he didn't know, made him hanker for his old life.

Up ahead, the office sign of Xarasoft – his old employer – glowed bright yellow, only a few lights on in the foyer of the mirrored glass tower. A company he had given twenty-one years of his life to.

Wesley gazed across the parking lot at the other monolithic towers that populated the business park. Cameras scanning everywhere. Most of the companies were technology firms and were contracted – like Xarasoft – to the National Security Agency.

He had had a good life.

A voice analyst who worked for the NSA as a contractor. Six figure basic salary. Huge bonuses. Foreign holidays. The works. Now he couldn't even pay his utility bills, he was so fucking broke and his wife had had to go back to work as a teacher.

His coworkers at Walmart had no idea what he used to do. They never asked. Even if they had he couldn't have told them the truth about his top-secret work. They probably wouldn't believe him anyway.

Wesley saw a light go on in the fourth floor of his old company. He wondered if they were communicating in
real-time
with the NSA, perhaps ingesting one or two intercepted bulletin boarding postings, instant messages, IP addresses or vital
FLASH
traffic that had been flagged up.

The more he thought of his old life the more depressed he felt.

His wife thought it was only the Prozac that was keeping him from being able to face the world. But there was something else which was keeping him going. The reason he wouldn't give up trying to get people to listen to what he knew.

He listened to the voices. He played voice comparison technology and listened over and over again in the small booth in his home study, headphones on, stripping down to the core voices. He wasn't sleeping during the day. His wife worried about him. But she didn't know what he knew.

Two days ago he had uncovered a smooth and terrifying narrative amongst the disembodied voices.

The problem was no one was listening.

Wesley took out his Blackberry and set about composing the latest encrypted email to his friend, Lance Drake, a Republican Congressman on the House Intelligence Committee. He stared at the email on the screen for a few moments before he sent the message. He put away his Smartphone and closed his eyes, thinking of his fiftieth birthday party only a year earlier, when the Congressman and other close friends attended a barbecue in his back yard. But now those same people he thought were his friends, people he had a beer with on a Saturday night, guys who he went bowling with once a month, didn't return his calls or go out for drinks.

His cell phone rang and Wesley almost jumped out of his skin.

“Thomas, what the hell are you playing at?” It was Drake, his old Yale drinking buddy.

Wesley cleared his throat. “Lance, appreciate the call back.”

“Do you know what time it is?” His voice was an angry whisper.

“Yes, I know what time it is. Did I wake you?”

“The buzzing of my fucking Blackberry on my bedside table woke me up.”

“Lance, why haven't you answered my emails?”

“Why haven't I answered your emails?” The tone was heavily sarcastic. “Do you want me to level with you?”

Wesley said nothing.

“You've sent me precisely seven emails – all virtually identical – in the last forty-eight hours alone. And not to put to fine a point on it, I'm starting to question your state of mind.”

“My state of mind, huh?” Wesley felt a knot of tension in his stomach. “There's nothing wrong with my state of mind.”

“Thomas, they say you had two psychological evaluations before you were sacked and that you show certain personality traits.”

“That's bullshit.”

Lance let out a long sigh. “Thomas, look, I know how smart you are. But the fact of the matter is you screwed up before. You made the wrong call.”

“It's that what they told you? That's bullshit.”

“They say you were flat out wrong.”

“They're lying.”