Ground Zero rj-13 Read online

  “No access at home?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” He frowned. “Don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t, but she told me she needs to keep changing her IP address for certain of her online activities.”

  “Such as?”

  “Wouldn’t say. Said I was better off—safer—not knowing.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Could she be involved in anything shady?”

  He made a face. “Weezy? You know her. Straight arrow.”

  “I knew her. Been a lot of years. You never know.”

  “She hasn’t changed all that much.”

  Jack remembered something. “You called her Louise Myers. I gather she’s married.”

  “Was. Married a guy named Steve Myers right after she graduated John Jay and—”

  “John Jay? The criminal justice place?”

  He nodded. “She has a BS in forensic science.”

  “Like I said: You never know. The marriage didn’t work out, I take it?”

  Ed shook his head. “Steve blew his brains out.”

  6

  “It is alive,” Drexler said.

  Darryl watched him run his hands over the surface of the Orsa’s flank like he was feeling up a woman. He hadn’t liked the feel of the thing, like football hide, but with a little more give. And he especially hadn’t liked that little ripple effect when he’d touched it.

  “How can it be?” Hank said, looking a little scared.

  “It simply is. And over the years it has been most entertaining to watch the transformation.”

  Entertaining? Darryl thought. Drexler found the weirdest things “entertaining.”

  Drexler’s voice dropped in volume. “But then, in the early hours of yesterday morning, it woke up.”

  “How could you tell?” Darryl said.

  Drexler didn’t look at him. “We knew.”

  “Well, like how?”

  Not like it had eyes that opened, or a mouth that could say good morning.

  He still wouldn’t look at Darryl. Like he thought if he didn’t look, Darryl would disappear. But Darryl wasn’t going anywhere.

  “When it awoke, the Orsa changed from an opaque gray to clear, as you see it now.”

  Darryl’s arm started to itch again. Damn.

  “Okay,” Hank said, “let’s just say I buy that this thing is alive and awake. What does it do?”

  Drexler looked at Hank—oh, sure, look at Hank but not Darryl.

  “As I said, it will help change the world.”

  Change the world . . . the Kicker Evolution was supposed to change the world, but Darryl got a real strong impression that they were talking about a different kind of change, and speaking in some sort of code.

  Hank didn’t look convinced. “Yeah? How?”

  He gave a sideward nod toward Darryl. “It’s too complicated to go into now.”

  “Hey,” Darryl said, scratching his arm, “I can tell when I’m not wanted.”

  Finally Drexler looked at him. “Can you now?”

  “Yeah. I’ll leave and let you get ‘complicated.’ ”

  “That would be—” Drexler stopped and stared. “What is that on your arm?”

  Darryl tugged his sleeve down. “Nothing.”

  Drexler stepped closer. “Show me.”

  “It’s nothing. I—”

  “Show me.”

  Didn’t look as if the guy was going to give up, so Darryl yanked up his sleeve and exposed the purplish rash. Drexler stared a few seconds, leaned in for a closer look.

  “Do you have more of these?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  “Half a dozen, I guess. You know what it is?”

  “How long have you had them?”

  Darryl was getting worried now. “A couple months. What is it?”

  “I’m not a doctor, but you need that looked at. Have you been having night sweats?”

  “N-no.”

  Not true. He’d been sweating a lot at night, and it was getting worse. Just last night he woke up with his undershirt so wet he could have wrung it out. He’d had to get up and change.

  But he didn’t know why he’d denied it. Maybe it was the way Drexler was looking at him . . . like he suddenly found him interesting. But not a caring interest. More like a guy who’d found a strange-looking bug.

  Maybe he was afraid Drexler would find him “entertaining.”

  “Be that as it may,” he said, pulling out a cell phone, “I’m going to call a doctor I know and get you an appointment immediately. You need a full work-up.”

  Now Darryl was really scared. “What do you think it is?”

  But Drexler wasn’t listening. He was frowning at his cell phone.

  “Forgot: no signal down here. We must go upstairs.”

  “Hold on a second there,” Hank said. “That can wait. I want to know how this thing’s gonna help change the world.”

  “I’m afraid this cannot wait. This man must see a doctor immediately.”

  Darryl didn’t know what frightened him more now: what might be wrong, or Drexler’s concern.

  7

  “She calls me every day at six P.M. sharp,” Ed was saying.

  They’d found a hotel with a bar—the first place they’d tried, the Excelsior, had been shockingly deficient in that amenity—and snagged a booth away from the windows. Jack didn’t sit in windows.

  “And I do mean sharp,” he added. “In years I don’t think she’s ever been more than five minutes late.”

  “Why the call?”

  “To let me know she was all right—for her sake rather than mine. After Steve’s death, she became concerned about living alone. Something could happen to her and no one would know. She could fall and lie there for days, dying of dehydration or starvation, with no one having a clue that anything was wrong. Or someone could come in and attack her and leave her there with the same result.”

  “So when yesterday’s call didn’t come . . . ?”

  “I called her. When I got no answer, I went over to her place and found it empty with no sign of a break-in.”

  “Just where is her place?”

  “Queens—Jackson Heights.”

  “So we assume that sometime between six o’clock Sunday night and six o’clock last night she went out—”

  “Sometime between dawn and six yesterday. She doesn’t go out at night.”

  The black-jacketed waiter arrived with their drinks. Jack had ordered a Heineken, Eddie a Ketel martini with three olives.

  Eddie . . . a martini drinker. Strange.

  “Why don’t we start off assuming no foul play,” he said as Ed took a hefty sip.

  “Why assume that? Her note—”

  “Because of Occam’s razor: It requires the fewest assumptions.”

  “Well, if there’s been no foul play, where would a recluse like her be, besides home?”

  “How about a hospital?”

  “First thing I tried. I called emergency services and they had no record of ferrying a Louise Myers to a hospital. I even had them check her maiden name, but no hits.”

  “Then we’ll have to try all the hospitals themselves. I mean, she could have felt ill and cabbed to an emergency room.”

  Ed frowned. “Never thought of that. How many hospitals are we talking about?”

  “Lots. But if she lives in Queens we should probably start there and work toward the city.”

  “ ‘We’? Does that mean you’re going to help?”

  “Hell, yes. This is Weez we’re talking about.”

  Ed was staring at him over the rim of his martini. “Just who are you, Jack?”

  “I’m the guy who used to whip your ass in Pole Position.”

  He gave a tight smile. “You’re also the guy I used to kill in Missile Command, but that doesn’t tell me why Weezy sent me to you instead of the cops. ‘Jack can find me’ when the cops can’t? What’s that all about?”

  How to answer that? He’d g
rown up with Eddie Connell and didn’t want to lie to him, but he wasn’t about to tell him the truth. As a teen he’d done plenty of things he’d shared with no one, especially Eddie, whose mouth had tended to runneth over.

  “I honestly don’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t have much contact with her after high school. Hardly any. I don’t know how she got my number or even knew I was in the city.”

  “So what are you? Some sort of detective or black ops guy or spook?”

  Jack had to laugh. “Not likely. Why would you even think that?”

  “Because of the way you disappeared. I got home from college and you were gone. I came looking for you and your father told me you’d walked out of the house and never come back, never called, never wrote. He and Kate were crazy with worry.”

  Jack took a long slow sip of his beer to buy some time.

  Yeah, that had been a rotten thing to do, but he hadn’t seen it that way at the time. He’d hit reset. He’d severed all ties with his old self, with his old life, with everyone he’d ever known and everything he’d planned to be. New start. New Jack. New life. He’d been angry, bitter, and a little crazy then—hell, a lot crazy—and hadn’t thought about the hurt and worry he’d cause. He’d just done it and never once looked back.

  Maybe he should have.

  “I assure you I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with any government—city, state, federal, foreign or domestic or intergalactic.”

  “Then why—?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll ask her when we find her.”

  He smiled. “I like the way you think. But what do you do?”

  “I run a repairs business.”

  “Appliances?”

  Jack blew right past that. “What about you?”

  “I’m an actuary.”

  “An insurance guy?”

  He looked a little put off. “I freelance to pension consultants and HMOs and, yes, insurance companies.”

  “So you crunch numbers all day? Makes sense. You were always good in math.”

  “It’s rated overall the second best job you can have.”

  “No kidding? What’s first?”

  “Biologist. Good work environment, good pay, little or no stress.”

  “Sounds great.”

  But Jack was thinking, Shoot me first. In the brainstem. With a .454 Casull hollowpoint, please, to guarantee no chance of survival.

  “You live in the city?”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah.” He took a gulp of his beer and hoped Eddie wouldn’t ask his address.

  “You know the city hospitals?”

  “A bit.”

  Knew more than he wished about some of them.

  “Good. I work here, but I commute from Jersey, so it’s not my stomping grounds.”

  “Well, Queens isn’t mine. We need to get to a computer and Google hospitals over there—”

  “This can do all that,” Eddie said as he pulled a BlackBerry or one of its clones from a pocket.

  Over the next few minutes he came up with a bunch of hospitals—the ones in Queens seemed mostly animal hospitals—and Jack wrote down the numbers. Then they divided the list and began calling.

  “Don’t forget to ask about any Jane Doe admitted yesterday too.”

  Ed slapped the table. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I just remembered: Weezy didn’t carry ID.”

  What?

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He shook his head. “Wish I was. She was afraid someone would steal her pocketbook and learn who she was and where she lived, so she never traveled with credit cards or anything.”

  “Then we just wasted our time. Call emergency services and see if they delivered a Jane Doe to a hospital yesterday.”

  Ed got right to it. Didn’t take him long—he had the number in his call history. He did some talking, then looked at Jack.

  “A Jane Doe was hit by a car yesterday afternoon half a dozen blocks from here. She was unconscious and they took her to Mount Sinai.”

  Jack rose as he gulped the rest of his beer.

  “Let’s go.”

  8

  Dawn Pickering stared down at the Jackie Onassis Reservoir in Central Park and felt one of her berserk moods coming on.

  She didn’t know if being three months pregnant had anything to do with it, or just the fact that she was totally a prisoner in this apartment. Not just an apartment—a beautiful apartment with every imaginable amenity. Beyond beautiful. A Fifth Avenue penthouse duplex overlooking Central Park. But a gilded cage. She wanted to smash its walls.

  She rubbed her swelling belly. She’d popped a few weeks ago and was showing. She realized it was a relatively small bump but it made her feel like an elephant.

  Back in May she’d sneaked out and landed herself in terrible trouble. She lived with daily reminders of those days. But she’d gone for a good reason—to abort the baby. She’d never wanted this baby, especially after learning the father’s—Jerry’s—true identity. And now, as the weeks passed, she was getting closer and closer to the point of no return, where she wouldn’t be able to get an abortion.

  And it was making her totally crazy.

  All Mr. Osala’s fault. He said he’d been hired by her mother to protect her and so he kept her locked up here. For her own good, he insisted. Because Jerry was out there, looking for her, looking for his child, and as long as she carried that child he would never hurt her. But if he ever learned that she had aborted his baby . . .

  No argument that Jerry was a totally dangerous guy, but she couldn’t have this baby!

  Didn’t anyone understand that? She was only eighteen. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in hiding. That would be like seventy or eighty years.

  She wanted to throw a knife at somebody.

  She turned away from the window and walked past the hot tub, the pool, the gym equipment, and went downstairs toward the living quarters. She was just stepping out of the stairwell when she saw Gilda the housekeeper leaving Mr. Osala’s suite. She knew from chitchat with the older woman that Mr. Osala had a bedroom, an office, and his own bath in there—the reason she hardly ever saw him on the rare times he was home.

  She noticed that the latch didn’t catch as Gilda pulled the door closed behind her. Dawn had long wanted a peek inside, but the door was always locked and Gilda would never let her in—the “Master” totally valued his privacy.

  Fine. But he’d taken charge of her life and she deserved to know a little more about him. She had only his word that Mom had hired him, and Mom wasn’t around to confirm or deny the story.

  Dawn felt her throat tighten. God, how she missed her. If she could have just one more day with her . . . even ten minutes . . .

  She shook it off and waited for Gilda’s solid form to bustle around a corner. Then she tiptoed to Mr. Osala’s door and slipped through. She checked the knob to make sure it would turn, then closed the door behind her. The windows were shaded, so she felt along the wall till she found a light switch.

  Shockingly bright overhead fluorescents flared to life, intensified by the stark white of the bare walls. Totally bare. Not a photo, not a painting, not even a scratch or nail hole to suggest that anything had ever decorated them. A big, plain mahogany desk dominated the room, sporting a computer monitor and nothing else. A black leather office chair and a filing cabinet completed the furnishings.

  This was it? This was his office? She’d expected dark paneling, lush carpeting, and all sorts of memorabilia.

  She moved to the next room and found more bare white walls surrounding a neatly made double bed with a light beige blanket but no spread. Two large armoires dominated the room. She opened one, then the other. Both were racked with expensive suits.

  Strange.

  But then, Mr. Osala was a strange man.

  Clothing appeared to be his only extravagance—that and the rest of the house. But as for his personal quarters, he lived like a monk. And he’d chosen rooms
with no view of the park. Not that it would matter with the heavy shades on the windows.

  She smiled. Might be evidence that he was a vampire, except she’d seen him standing in full sunlight. So it had to be a privacy thing.

  Dawn wandered back to the office area and pulled open one of the desk drawers for a peek. She spotted a driver’s license and what looked like a college ID. She reached—

  “The Master is a man who values his privacy.”

  Dawn gasped and looked up to see a thick-bodied woman with gray, bunned hair standing by the door.

  Gilda.

  “The door was open.” She felt her face redden as she slammed the drawer shut. “I was just curious.”

  “You are trouble,” the older woman said in accented English—Eastern Europe somewhere. “You have been trouble since the day he brought you here.”

  She had been warm to Dawn in the beginning, but then Dawn had made her escape and Henry, Mr. Osala’s chauffeur, had suffered for it. Gilda and Henry had been friends. Now Henry was gone, and with him, Gilda’s warmth.

  “I totally don’t mean to be. I’m just so bored. Can you understand that?”

  She nodded. “Of course I can.”

  Good. Maybe Gilda was mellowing a little toward her. Dawn needed an ally here. Mr. Osala’s new driver was totally unreachable. That left only Gilda.

  She didn’t know why she was afraid of Mr. Osala. He’d never threatened her, hadn’t punished her for disobeying him. He saw to her every comfort, gave her everything she asked for except freedom and communication with the outside world—no phone, no Internet, which meant no MySpace or Face-book. She was totally cut off from everyone she’d ever known. He said that was to protect her from giving away her location. Maybe so, but it seemed totally extreme.

  And there were times . . . the way he looked at her . . . no lust or anything like that, just sort of . . . calculating. She would have totally preferred lust. She could handle lust.

  She had this feeling sometimes that he wasn’t saving her from something so much as saving her for something.

  She stepped closer to Gilda and looked her in the eyes.

  “Then you won’t tell Mr. Osala about this?”