Only a few scant hours ago, everything was fine. It was just this morning that she stood in the sunshine, content and cautiously optimistic. But that seems like years ago now. Now, Clarice Starling's stomach is pricked with pieces of broken glass. Now, everything has shattered into pieces. Now, her daughter has disappeared.
The scene is a meeting room in the depths of Quantico. No natural light pierces the room; natural light is not present in a room sixty feet below the surface of the earth. Only a nasty fluorescent light overhead casts light down on a Formica table. Clarice glances around her workplace and finds it sterile and artificial in a way she never has quite thought of before.
Clarice herself is quite natural. A mother terrified that her offspring has followed her heart over her head and gone off to do something monumentally stupid. Horrible images flick through her mind as they have flicked through the mind of a billion other mothers of a billion other teenagers over a million years, ever since teenagers wore the latest in bear skins and argued with their parents over who they were going mammoth hunting with.
Unfortunately for Clarice, a thousand different crime scenes remind her ever so helpfully of all the horrible things that can befall a teenager out on her own. Particularly a female teenager. She doesn't have to imagine what could happen to Susana; she sees that sort of thing every day.
Worse, for her, is a not completely welcome gift from her own background. The Lutheran Home in Montana gave Clarice Starling food and shelter for most of her childhood. They also gave her a strong moral framework to build on, insuring her strict adherence to their moral code. From her tenth to eighteenth year in their care, there is a remaining dour Lutheran in the back of her mind, constantly reminding her what is right and what is night.
Now she is lashed to that framework and hoist in her own petard. The vestigial Lutheran who has guided her through these years is now shaking his head. She envisions her Lutheran as an older man, balding, with clean-shaven jowls and a pristinely clean but understated suit – nothing too fancy. She can hear the tut-tut-tut in her lower brain and cringes at the sound of it.
Clarice Starling, you are partially responsible for this, that dour, hard Lutheran reminds her. You should have told your daughter about this long ago. If you had you probably wouldn't have been here today.
Clarice has agreed with that voice on many issues. Do the crime, do the time. Tell it to the judge. She has been dismissive of the stories of those she has arrested as so much sob stories, and she has been derisive when those sob stories got crooks off the hook. She, too, has been hard.
Normally, she has been as hard on herself as she has been on others. She put herself through college, finishing first in her class. She drove herself relentlessly, rarely permitting herself relaxation or luxuries.
Even now, in her third life with her daughter, she has driven herself as she always has. She has taken some time to stop and smell the roses, but is that such a bad thing? When the fleshy features of her Lutheran conscience point out her own misgivings, Clarice finds words that she has always privately mocked coming to her lips. No, wait. I can explain. Hear me out.
I wanted to protect her, she wants to protest. I did everything for her safety and well-being. I couldn't let a serial killer raise her, could I? She'd have become a monster just like him. I wanted to tell her, and I was going to. What if she'd told one of her friends, who told someone else, and then the next thing you know the Tattler would be on our doorstep. I never once thought she would have her DNA scanned by the freaking evidence labs. She wasn't ready. I was trying to protect her. That's what mothers do.
It doesn't totally still the inner Lutheran. No matter what, that dour gentleman points out, Susana has disappeared. Clarice bears some responsibility for that no matter what. Despite her defenses, Clarice should have told her daughter, did not tell her daughter, and is therefore suffering the consequences just as those who shirk their duties rightfully suffer the consequences.
And suffering she is, here in this meeting room in Behavioral Sciences with images of innocent teenagers flickering through the forefront of her mind and an unforgiving copy of the man she always thought of as Revrunt clucking his tongue in the back. Her stomach is churning and roiling. Everything feels like she is walking on shards of broken glass. God, let Susana turn up safely. She will find a way to make it right. Making things right is what she does. If she only gets the chance, she will.
The door opens, and Lloyd Bowman, current Section Chief of the Investigative Support Unit, enters. He looks calmly at her, his Asian features giving nothing away. In his hands he has a manila folder. She knows one thing that is in it: the police report that she filed this morning A bored policewoman running to fat had taken it and reminded her in between snaps of gum that most of the time kids turned up on their own. Lloyd, thank God, had been willing to make a few phone calls and see what he might be able to turn up.
And now, after only a few hours, he has something. If fate has been particularly kind, Susana will be in a police station somewhere waiting for her. If fate has been particularly cruel, Susana will be in a morgue somewhere, and it will be the morgue staff waiting for her to come identify her daughter. The thought of that makes Clarice's heart pound and tears rise to her eyes.
Lloyd sits down and pulls up his chair slowly, taking his time. Silence holds sway in the room. Clarice's eyes are full of need and pain as she observes him. His gaze shows some concern and sympathy. All the same, he may be thinking the same thing as Clarice's inner Lutheran: You're here because you screwed up.
Her voice sounds weak and frightened to her. "Do you…do you have anything?"
He nods. "Yes," he says briskly.
An awful wave of fear wallops her. "Is she…is she all right?"
Lloyd stops and purses his lips. "We don't know," he says. "She's not dead, though." He leans back in the chair. "Let me tell you what we were able to find, and we'll go from there."
Clarice nods bleakly.
"Okay." His voice sounds more businesslike. Paper shuffles, the sound absurdly loud here in the underground room.
"In chronological order. Your daughter has a car, twenty-year-old Honda with Virginia plates. That's here on the Missing Persons report. A cop saw her early Friday morning on New Hampshire Ave. He stopped her and asked her why she wasn't in school. She told him she was a foreign national looking to renew her passport. He only remembered her because of her eyes. Hadn't ever seen red eyes like that before. He let her go, that was that."
Clarice swallows. "But Susana's not a foreign national," she says blankly.
Bowman sighs and exhales slowly through his nostrils. "Yes, she is," he says gently. "The Argentine embassy is at 1600 New Hampshire. That's where she was going. Embassy staff was willing to cough up some facts. She showed up at nine AM and filled out the paperwork for a new passport in the name of Susana Alvarez."
The mention of the alias that Susana had been born under makes Clarice shudder. "Did they give her one?" she asks, knowing the answer already.
Bowman nods solemnly. "She showed up with the right size pictures and a birth certificate showing she'd been born in Buenos Aires, and they had no reason to think there was anything weird about it," he adds.
A passport. Clarice's stomach clenches. Please let her be using it for ID. Just that. Please, for Christ's sakes, was I this wrong?
Bowman's next words shatter that forlorn hope.
"Next she was seen was at Reagan International," he says. "Her car is there in long-term parking. I sent some forensics boys over to get it. She took a ten AM flight to Toronto. There's a copy of the tape coming over from the boys at TSA. They flagged her because it looked sort of funny – Argentine national flying from the US to Canada. Also, she had no luggage, and that raises eyebrows."
"Did they stop her?" Clarice asks hopefully. Part of her hates this; she is reduced to simple sentences.
He shakes his head, his ebony hair gleaming in the overhead light. "She told them she was studying in Canada," he says. "She also acted embarrassed and said that she had a friend in Canada who had driven her stuff up there already and that was why she had no luggage. Guy I talked to over at TSA felt real bad about it. But again…at the time he had no reason to think it was anything different. He figured if she had problems with Immigration Canada, that was Immigration Canada's ball of wax. She got on the plane and took off."
Ten AM. She left at ten AM. By the time Clarice had gone out for lunch, her daughter was in another country. Another lurch rocked her stomach and she tasted sour acid in the back of her throat.
"Is she in Toronto now?" Clarice asks again, her eyes pained and needy.
Bowman shakes his head again in a gesture she has grown to hate.
"Her plane landed at Pearson at eleven-thirty," he says calmly. Then he swallows. "She never left the airport. Took off on another flight at twelve-fifteen. Good timing, if you ask me. Pearson security boys said she had no luggage, too. All the same, they let her go without too much problem."
Tears prick Clarice's eyes. Some airport security. Two countries just let her sixteen-year-old daughter waltz on through security checkpoints. No one thought enough to stop her and ask any questions? How could they do that?
"Where?" Clarice's voice seems dead in the still air of the underground room.
Bowman sighs. "Havana. Cuba. That's where the trail stops. Cuban authorities are dicking me around. They said it's none of the FBI's business if an Argentine girl travels to Cuba. They won't help. We know the plane landed in Havana in the afternoon, and we know she got off it because it came back for the evening flight. "
Clarice swallows. For a long moment her throat is too dry to complete the transaction.
"They…won't help?" she asks in amazement. "She is my daughter. How could they piss and moan about Elian Gonzalez and not help return my daughter?"
Bowman shrugs. "I sent a request to State. We don't have diplomatic representation in Cuba, but there is a guy there who sees to US interests. I'm doing everything I can, Clarice."
The urge to cry is strong, as is the urge to scream, punch the wall, or perhaps invade Cuba herself in an F-16. Her daughter is 90 miles off the Florida coast, and they won't help?
"I know you are," Clarice says, her voice clogged by tears she refuses to shed. "I know, Lloyd. And I appreciate it more than you could ever know. But for Christ's sake…she's just angry with me. She's confused. She's sixteen and she's gone off and done something half-cocked. You're telling me they won't help so that Fidel fucking Castro can thumb his nose at the US? That…that can't be right."
Bowman shrugs. "Well," he says, "we can try. US Marshal's Service needs your okay to release the seal on her name change papers. Once we do that, we can prove that Susana Starkey and Susana Alvarez are the same person. It'll give us room to press the Cubans, but it's going to take some time."
"Do it," Clarice says strengthlessly. What the hell is her daughter doing in Cuba? The girl can't live without air conditioning and junk food; the socialist worker's paradise is not going to be to her liking. She can't possibly be thinking of defecting, can she? The idea seems impossible, but the idea that her daughter could've so easily skipped out of the country and put herself beyond her mother's reach would've seemed impossible early this morning. It's elegantly simple. Cuba is the one country in the hemisphere that will be likely to jerk the FBI around on every single little technical detail.
Bowman sighs and looks away, as of continuing is an awful chore he would rather not do.
"Clarice, let me ask you something," he says. "Did Susana ever have phone calls that she didn't you around for?"
Clarice pauses. Why is he asking? Susana didn't have a boyfriend that she knew of. And does he have to talk of Susana in the past tense?
"She likes talking on the phone," she hedges. "She's sixteen, of course she does. I didn't monitor her phone calls, though. But nothing…nothing that didn't arouse my suspicion."
Bowman nods. His questions flow quickly; the weapons of an investigator on the trail. She knows the feeling.
"How about computers? You have a PC at home?"
Clarice nods.
"Does she have her own or do you share one?"
Clarice stops. It's weird to be the one asked the questions. She's been used to asking them. All the same, Lloyd is on the same side as she is.
"She has her own," Clarice confirms. "Just a little one I bought a couple years ago for her."
"Was she online?"
Clarice nods again. "We have DSL," she says confusedly.
"Bring the computer in. If we're lucky she didn't format the drive. If she did, I still want the tech boys to have a look at it. I think we're going to find that she was talking with someone without you knowing. Could be via phone, but it might be via instant-messaging programs too. Something where she could have a conversation in relative privacy."
All she can do is nod and feel helpless and angry. She knows what she wants: she wants her daughter back so she can explain. But how to get there seems so very far.
"What makes you think that?" she asks, suddenly cross. "I did supervise my daughter, you know. I just…you don't raise a daughter in a miniature police state. Why would she talk to someone without my knowing? And how do you know those are related?"
"Does anything about this strike you as weird, Clarice?" Lloyd asks.
She puts a hand to her forehead and lets out a snort.
"Everything," she says. "I know I screwed up. I know I should've told her. But for Christ's sakes, Lloyd, I was trying to protect her. I just…I never thought she'd do this."
Bowman nods and reaches across the table to pat her shoulder comfortingly. Clarice stiffens. All that weak girly crap, I always hated that.
"That's not what I mean," he says. "I know you meant well. I mean how she put this together. A sixteen-year-old girl. No visible source of income. And she puts together an escape plan like this in three days? Does that make sense to you?"
Clarice shudders. It is hard to think of her daughter as planning flight like this, but it is possible for Susana to have financed her own escape. Stolen credit cards, or even one of those perverts on the Internet, although that idea makes her knees jelly.
"She had help. She had to have had help. You can reserve tickets and such through the Internet, and these days you can do it from anywhere in the world with very little planning time. But this plan was too slick for a sixteen-year-old to come up with it. Using Cuba as a way to muddy the waters? That's brilliant. I'm not saying your daughter is dumb, but does she really know enough international politics to figure that one out?"
Clarice stops and thinks. Susana is a bright kid, but she doesn't know if Susana could've come up with that. But if she didn't, then who did?
"I tried running down the tickets," he continues. "They were bought through a travel agency in Toronto. I didn't want to tell you until I'd told you everything else."
She shudders again. Why? Was it that bad? Was it…?
"Well?" Clarice asks, her voice cracking like dry leaves.
Lloyd Bowman lets out another sigh.
"Tickets were bought and paid for by some shell corporation. Bought on Wednesday morning with a corporate credit card. Established six months ago by some company that sets up companies for whatever you want, right over the Internet. Bank accounts and home address of the company were in Baltimore. We're running down what we can on it."
Clarice tenses. In some way, she knows. A long shadow of despair pierces her as Bowman continues. Her inner Lutheran tells her it is fitting. Lloyd's voice is calm, like a police officer delivering news of a loved one's death.
"The company that bought Susana's tickets," the Asian man says regretfully, "was named Raspail Ragout, Inc."