Hard Road (7 page)

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Wrong answer. Maybe this will focus your mind.”

A shot rang out down the line as Reznick drove on in stunned silence.

The man came back on. “Do we have your attention now? I hope so. OK, Jon, hopefully you realise that we are serious people. So, I'm going to come straight to the point. It's not just Beth that we took. We also have your daughter.”

Everything seemed to slow down as he tried to comprehend what was happening. The word
daughter
sent Reznick spiraling into a private hell. His beautiful daughter. How could this be happening? Wasn't she still at school? The chain of events was swamping him and he realised he'd gone into shock.

“She's very pretty. But if you want to see her again, you need to do exactly as I say. I will call you back in two minutes.”

The line went dead as an unbearable emptiness opened up inside Reznick.

He pulled over on a tree-lined residential street four blocks from the safe house in the pre-dawn darkness. His heart raced as a black anger began to build deep within him, ready to devour him at any moment. Part of him wanted it to. But then, slowly, it subsided, as his training kicked in.

He began to think and reason, moving beyond a visceral reaction as he tried to figure out exactly how to respond.

The questions began to rain down. How on God's earth had they kidnapped Beth and Lauren? She boarded at an exclusive school in western Massachusetts. But then it slowly dawned on him that she must've stayed over in New York with Beth for a day or two – which she did occasionally – before she was due to meet up with Reznick on Christmas Eve in Maine.

So, was she being held in New York? But that didn't explain how those guys knew about his family.

He wracked his brains. He'd only had a handful of friends over the years, and they'd drifted from him since Elisabeth's death.

No one, not even among his oldest friends in Rockland – guys he'd grown up with throughout the late nineteen seventies and into the nineteen eighties, when his hometown was a tough fishing port struggling with boarded up shops on Main Street and motorcycle gangs with their dogs running amok in the bars – had any inkling of Lauren's whereabouts. He'd deliberately tried to shield her from his shadowy world. Even Davie McNeish, his closest friend since High School – who he used to drink beers with on the Rockland harbor breakwater when they were both fifteen – was kept in the dark. Davie, who now ran Radio Free Rockland, the only guy he felt he could trust with anything – who he'd called at crazy hours to talk about Elisabeth and who he used to occasionally hang out with at the Myrtle Street Tavern when he was back home – was none the wiser about Lauren. He'd kept it that way since Elisabeth had died. He wanted her to be away when he came home from a job. He was always in a black mood, and wanted to be alone. She didn't need to see him like that.

The bottom line was that he didn't want his daughter anywhere near him or his world.

His mind flashed back to an evening at the Myrtle. The only time the subject had been openly broached by someone out with his tightknit circle. Danny Grainger, a lobsterman and obnoxious High School classmate, who hated his life and liked to drink himself into oblivion six out of seven nights a week, approached Reznick and asked about his daughter. He had heard that Reznick was in the military. Reznick knew he was spoiling for a fight and would have gladly obliged. But he just smiled and said his daughter was fine, and thanks for asking, and left it that.

The answer'd seemed to placate Danny and he'd smiled his best drunk's smile, put his arm around Reznick and proceeded to talk at length about how he didn't recognise the working class town of Rockland these days. The once tough waterfront of fish-packing and commercial docks now transformed, especially downtown around Main Street and the harbor, with countless art galleries, museums, fancy restaurants and the North Atlantic Blues Festival. But Reznick hadn't given him or anyone, that or any night, a clue about where his daughter was.

He knew that in his line of work, the best way to get to people is to get to their family. Easy targets.

Luntz cleared his throat loudly in the back seat, snapped Reznick back to reality. “What the hell is going on?” he said.

Reznick turned round and pointed a finger in Luntz's face. “Not a fucking word.”

Luntz looked close to tears as he shook his head.

A few moments later, a chime tone on the dead man's iPhone signaled a message. He opened up the inbox. A short video clip. His mother-in-law was lying tied to a pillar in a dingy basement or warehouse, hands behind her back, blindfold over her eyes. He noticed the emerald stone round her neck, the one her late husband had given her as a
fiftieth birthday present. He watched her bony shoulders begin to shake, then her lip, before the gun was pressed to her head and her brains splattered onto a steel pillar.

He closed his eyes as revulsion swept over him. He shut down the message as his breathing quickened.

Reznick needed to get control back. Focus. He thought of Lauren. She was only eleven. He couldn't be sure they had her. But deep down he sensed they weren't bullshitting.

He needed to contact Maddox.

Reznick picked up the cell and punched in his number. Then, just as he was about to press the green phone icon to dial, he stopped. He didn't know why but he just did. He needed to take things slow. He needed time to think.

The more time he thought of it the more it began to dawn on him that he couldn't entrust anyone else on this. The less people who knew the better. He had to do this his way. This was his daughter. She was priceless. He couldn't allow one false move that could jeopardise her. All it would take would be a phone call to Maddox, which they would be monitoring.

The cell phone rang again.

“If you don't want the same thing to happen to your daughter, listen and listen good. You will take what I want to Miami. You will drive him there so as to avoid any problems at airports or trains. In just over twenty-four hours' time, we will contact you on this number, and talk about an exchange. If you speak to the police, the Feds or anyone, you will receive the same video image of your daughter getting a bullet in the head. Don't disappoint me, Jon.”

Then the line went dead.

The call was the beginning of a nightmare for Reznick, the voice like a dark whisper that echoed in his head.

Terrifying emotions clouded his shattered mind as he started the long drive south on I-95, the beginning of a fevered journey. What if they were about to kill his daughter? What if she was screaming for her life at that moment?

He imagined his beautiful daughter being pulled by her auburn hair and then slapped. Was she being humiliated?

He began to burn up inside. Nightmarish images seared into his psyche as if by a hot poker. His mind flashed back to Beth's dreadful final moments. A woman who had suffered so much with the loss of her daughter, Reznick's wife, on 9/11. A woman who had tried to rebuild her shattered life, despite not having a body to bury. A woman who had looked after Lauren in the years after her mother's death. What a terrible end to a fine woman.

His mind flashed back to the first time Reznick was introduced to Elisabeth's parents. It was dinner at the Café Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel on the East Side, half a block from their townhouse. A pianist played jazz standards as the wine flowed, and Elisabeth draped her arm around him as Beth smiled.

Waves of guilt swept over him. He alone was responsible for Beth's death and his daughter's kidnapping. His shadowy world had encroached on his family.

He drove on as his mood darkened further. The anger coursed through his blood and veins, developing like a cancer, threatening to eat him alive. On and on he drove south.

Reznick pulled over four times during the sixteen-hour journey. Deeper and deeper, closer and closer. The man in the back seat, Luntz, tried to make conversation. But Reznick was too busy trying to figure out what the hell to do.

The hours dragged. He wondered if he was making a monumental mistake going it alone. Was he doing the right thing? Wouldn't Maddox have been the guy to call? It wasn't too late.

On and on as doubts filled his head.

He drove on, tormented as he headed down through the Carolinas. Eventually he pulled off I-95 and drove into Florence, South Carolina. He still had blood relations that lived nearby although he had never met them. His mother's bloodline could be traced back to Scots who had been forced off the land during the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century. They had immigrated first to Nova Scotia before they crossed the border, stopping off in Maine. His mother could trace her roots back to one Jimmy MacKinley, who had moved his family to Maine in the late
nineteenth century, where he became a fisherman. The rest of the MacKinleys headed down to the Carolinas. Poachers, trappers and outlaws, unable and unwilling to be tamed. They lived on the land. Backwoodsmen. Renegades. It was their home. Wild people.

He pondered on that as he found a parking garage and stole a black Lexus with tinted windows. Afterwards, they went to a diner and ate in silence, before Reznick got back onto the freeway, headed for Florida. But as the day drew to a close, as he crossed the Florida state line, a plan had begun to formulate in his mind.

Simply turning up and handing over Luntz wasn't an option.
They
held all the cards. What he needed was someone he could trust to keep Luntz safe and someone who could help him out.

He knew such a man. A man he'd trust with his life.

Just before midnight, Reznick turned off I-95 and headed into Fort Lauderdale, South Florida. Luntz was out cold in the trunk, and had been for the last hour, trussed up like a chicken. He pulled up half a block from the neon-lit and spray-painted entrance of the Monterey Club. The bar was located south of downtown, close to the commercial bars of Las Olas, next to a tattoo parlor, part of the same complex that sold classic bikes.

The owner of the bar was an old Delta operator, Harry Leggett, his best man at his wedding. Tough, funny and a complete nightmare after ten bottles of Heineken. Leggett was the only one from Delta his late wife, Elisabeth, had liked.

It was Leggett's sister Angie, who worked alongside Elisabeth, who'd introduced her coworker to Reznick.

His mind flashed back to their first date. It was imprinted on his mind. He was home for two weeks' leave and Angie had suggested they meet up as a foursome for a drink at McSorley's Old Ale House, a spit and sawdust dive in the East Village. Elisabeth talked fast about everything under the sun from running the New York Marathon to fighting off a mugger in Central Park with pepper spray to her expensive education at the Chapin School. He'd surprised himself by liking her immediately. They just clicked. He had never entertained the thought of settling down until he saw her. She was beautiful, neurotic, open, relaxed in his company and, he noticed, quick at self-deprecation. She was from a different world. She talked of Cubism and modern art. He hadn't had a clue what that was all about. But there was an immediate connection.

He'd listened to her go into minute detail about the distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion. They'd drunk warm beer in half-filled mugs and ate a cheese platter with raw onion and hot mustard. When she'd asked him about his work, he didn't tell her about Delta, but said he worked overseas a lot for the government. She hadn't pressed him further. He'd liked that, but guessed that Angie might have filled her in on the details. Then he'd talked of Rockland and how it was a great town these days. He'd told her about new art galleries popping up almost overnight and how it was changing the image of his hometown. He'd talked of the calming nature of the sea, the smell of the fresh fish that had just been landed and of the crowded Main Street, thronged by visitors in the summer months. He'd told her that when he smelled the sea, he knew he was home. And that he was safe. She'd listened intently. She'd said she always wanted to live by the sea; work was in Manhattan, but she could see herself giving it all up for a less stressed life.

The possibilities seemed endless.

He'd felt like a different person. The following day they'd met up again and walked in the park. Within a few months, and quite out of character after returning from the Gulf, he'd found himself proposing to her at the Crystal Room at the Tavern on the Green overlooking Central Park. The following year, 1999, they'd got married. The wedding reception had been at the Plaza on August 14, 1999, a blazing hot day. Twenty Delta operators wearing impeccable grey morning suits turned up and sat in the corner of the main ballroom, guzzling beer and laughing uproariously as the band played Carpenters covers. Elisabeth's family, blue bloods who gave large donations to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art, had looked aghast; although Beth seemed to enjoy it more than her husband. The highlight of the evening had been an inebriated Leggett attempting to mimic the moonwalk of Michael Jackson as the band played
Billie Jean,
before collapsing in a heap
,
leaving the Delta crew in stitches.

The sound of thrash metal from Leggett's bar snapped him out of his reverie for a few moments. The tiredness was starting to swamp him. He popped a couple of Dexedrine.

Reznick closed his eyes and his mind flashed back to 9/11. The news footage of the collapsing towers. The smoke. The dust cloud. The twisted metal. The mayhem.

The world of Reznick and Leggett were inextricably linked that fateful day.

Elisabeth and Angie were both tax attorneys and worked in the same law firm in Tower One of the Twin Towers and both perished on 9/11. Leggett's sister was one of the jumpers, trapped by the flames, jumping alone from the eighty-ninth floor to her death. The downward spiral of his old friend Leggett had begun on that day.