Lisa ran into the westbound tunnel. She still had her bag, but she'd dropped her phone, somewhere back in the warren of platform-access tunnels at Holborn; she was keeping to the center of the tracks. That was the sum of her rational contribution to the process of fleeing Robert Grant.
The light from the platform fell away quickly to dust gray. Fifty yards into the tunnel, she was running in blackness--
-- stupid, STUPID, stupid--
Her head was burring with sound. The tunnel seemed alive with vibrations. A century's-worth of noises, trapped and whispering, clacking, squealing, screaming, metal on metal, hissing, rumbling--
Rumbling.
Behind her.
She stopped; she turned. She blinked into the light approaching from Holborn--
-- was she moving toward it, or was it moving toward her--?
She felt through the soles of her boots the trundle-hiss, trundle-hiss, trundle of acceleration. The light stretched its rays, filled the tunnel.
A train.
The beams from the headlamps pinned her in place. Like the molten glare of Piccadilly. Only now she had nowhere to go. She froze. Whatever was in her skull locked her eyes on the approaching light. She was wearing dark clothing (she was dressed, as Jackson had been, in theatre-casual, both of them in jeans and sweaters for the show at the Criterion); she couldn't think to run, to press herself to the tunnel's curving wall, even to throw herself as flat as possible on the tracks. She couldn't think to wave her arms and shout. All she could do was look into that light like a sun trapped underground and think miss me, miss me, miss me--
"Miss--?"
-- me miss me--
A hand tugged at her right sleeve. Lisa turned her head and found herself looking at the thin pale face of a young man. Compared to the sun of the approaching train, a lamp in his hand cast a lesser light, a moon's glow.
"This way, miss."
His face winked into blackness as he turned away. The light of his lamp bobbed at a trotting pace, heading deeper into the tunnel. Lisa followed.
The light turned to the left and disappeared. Wind pushed at Lisa's back as the approaching train compressed the air from the tunnel. No horn. No squeal of brakes. The iron ribs of the tunnel focused the rumbling directly into the bones of her head. She felt herself slowing-- something seductive in the light breaking over her shoulders, hypnotic, the original advertising, light, a call to growth, leaves rearing toward the sun, crops ripening, a way to the surface, a way out, a way OUT WAY OUT--
"Here, miss."
His voice was quiet but clear above the pounding roar of the train. Thin hard fingers caught her wrist and pulled her to the left.
They were in the terminus of a second tunnel, facing south. The smoky gray light of the lamp revealed rough brickwork, plaster patching, dirt and dust: the mouth of the tunnel was blocked all the way to the floor, and nearly to the ceiling. In the center of the brick wall was a rusting iron door dark with greasy soot. The young man braced himself-- Lisa saw him more clearly now, as the rounded walls of the terminus gathered and focused the light from his lamp: he was about Jackson's height but much thinner; his hair was brown and trimmed close to his scalp; and he wore gray coveralls cinched at the waist with a heavy leather toolbelt-- and shoved down hard on a metal handle at the door's left side. The handle gave way; the door opened.
"Through here, miss."
He held the lantern before him and ducked to step through the door. As Lisa followed, the train from Holborn roared by behind her.
*****
Lisa said to the young man's coveralled back. "Who are you?"
"Jim, miss." He glanced over his shoulder as he walked. His voice was polite, a bit shy. "My name's Jim."
He didn't ask her name in turn. She had the feeling that he considered such asking a breach of manners. She had the feeling, then, as well, that he already knew--
"Where are we?"
Asking, she stopped walking, leaned her shoulder against a curved wall. Tiles golden-cream, hatched crosses in pine green, in the light of Jim's lamp. Cool and gritty-smooth through the weave of her sweater. She was feeling tired. Deeply tired. She was in no shape to analyze, but at a guess she might think it a combination of fear, flight, adrenaline, and whatever the hell was sharing space with her mind. Now that she was away from the visual shout of the surface and the bright interiors of the train cars, it wasn't as bad. Less to want, here in the dark. Less calling to her. All that remained was a sort of vestigial sound, a background noise like whispering. If she listened carefully, she nearly caught words--
"Aldwych, miss. That is where you wanted to go, isn't it?"
"I'm at the Aldwych. Jackson and-- A friend of mine and I: we're staying at the--"
She paused. The words seemed to lead her thoughts in circles. Jim came back to where she stood. The lamplight cast wider as he turned, and Lisa saw that they were on the platform of a Tube station. The tracks were to their left. The wall against which she was leaning was grimy; the ads and posters were worn or torn away--
CADBU ILK CHOC ATE
EINZ SAUC AT DINNE TIME
LET US GO FORWARD TOGETHER
The man in the poster had a jowly bulldog's face. His shoulders were squared in a heavy black coat. From across the tracks, his dark eyes stared fiercely at her. She should know him, Lisa thought. If it weren't for the whispering on the platform, she would--
"Who is that, Jim?"
He came closer with the lamp. "That's the Prime Minister, miss. Mr. Churchill."
"I thought-- wait: isn't Tony Blair--"
Behind them, the way they'd come, a moan echoed down the tunnel. It wasn't just in her head. Lisa started.
"What was--"
A banging, now. Like a sledgehammer on a fifty-gallon steel drum. The sound bounced and thudded along the dirty tiles of the platform.
"Jim, what was that--?"
He was looking where Lisa was looking, toward the north end of the platform. "That's Mary, miss. She's lost her little girl. She comes down sometimes looking for her."
The moaning again, closer. And words Lisa couldn't quite catch--
"Shouldn't we let someone know?"
"They know, miss." In the light of the lamp, Jim's face was very still. His eyes on hers were reasonable. For the first time, Lisa saw how much they resembled Jackson's eyes: very clear, very blue. Unworldly. "Best to leave her be."
He walked off, down the platform. Lisa followed his light, a new question knotting inside her--
"You work for London Transport, right? The Tube--?"
"The Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton Railway: yes, miss." The phrase was a mouthful; he seemed to take pride in saying it.
Another banging. This one sounded nearer still. No moaning followed, but words did, still not correctly formed. Lisa heard them practically inside her head. They dropped like bits of concrete-- bricks, chipped mortar, dirt, and dust-- between her thoughts. She had to struggle to form her next query:
"Don't they issue you walkie-talkies--?"
"Not far now, miss," Jim replied.
They were at the southern end of the platform. Jim climbed down onto the tracks. The smoky light from his lamp seemed to run up against the darkness at the mouth of the tunnel and dead-end there. He held out his hand.
"Where are we going?" Lisa whispered.
"Aldwych, miss."
His eyes were Jackson's eyes. His face was thinner, but his smile when he smiled was Jackson's smile. Not his smirk. Gentle and boyish and knowing. Lisa took his hand. His fingers were rough and bony and reassuringly strong. As cold as the tiles along the platform wall.
She climbed down off the platform and followed him, where he and his smoky light led her, along the tracks, into the tunnel.
*****
Robert Grant waited on the platform of Holborn station for an emergency stop that never occurred. The final train of Saturday evening and Sunday morning glided off into the westbound tunnel and disappeared with no subsequent, startled squealing of brakes, no alarms, no overhead announcements regarding accidents, stoppages, or calls for medics. No doubt London Transport had its code for such events-- Mr. Smith to the station office, please, or similar sidespeak-- but, as it happened, Grant, standing alone near the voltage warning at the head of the tunnel, heard nothing but the announcement that the station would be closing in fifteen minutes.
Where had she gone--?
If the train had hit her, the engineer would know, right? People weren't invisible; they were solid chunks of flesh and bone. And Lisa Reisert had been messed up. Stoned or drugged on top of being panicked and afraid--
Stoned on what?
She was clean. He'd watched her at Gordon's; he could tell. She could pack away her share of alcohol, but her skin was good, she wasn't twitchy, and her pupils weren't dilated: she wasn't a user. She wasn't shooting up. She wasn't in the restroom at the Criterion doing a line before she and Rippner continued their evening. (As far as Grant could tell, Jackie-boy was all the high she needed.)
So why the animal panic in her eyes before she turned and ran into the tunnel--?
The stories made the rounds after the Keefe mission. Sure, Rippner had counted on taking a beating-- all part of his cover, and Grant had weathered his own share of such shit on jobs-- but the thrashing Lisa Reisert had handed Jack the Ripper was the stuff of eternal water-cooler legend. So why would she run in terror from a guy Rippner's size who held only half the knife Rippner had waved in her face?
"Shit--" he whispered. The nanites. Why he was after her in the first damn place. The things could get inside your head. If his hunch was correct, and Becker had passed them to her at Gordon's, then--
"She touched them," he said to the empty platform. The container was leaking. "Son of a bitch--"
He edged past the barrier, the sign with the electrocuted stick-man, and climbed down onto the tracks. The last train had come and gone. The station was closed. He had an L.E.D. flashlight on his keychain; he got it out--
"Hey--! What do you think you're doing?"
Grant turned. Approaching him on the platform was a man in a white hard-hat and a blaze-orange boiler suit.
"I, umm, I--"
Grant stumbled as he climbed back onto the platform. Leaned drunkenly into the signed gate.
"I think I missed-- Whazzat the lashtrain--?"
"You're not catching it that way, boyo." The man was nearly to him. "You can't be here. Station's closed--"
"Right--" Pushing off from the gate, Grant doubled over. He reached up under his coat for the knife handle hanging from the sheath below his left arm. He unsnapped the retaining strap with his thumb, gripped the handle tight. "Jus' lemme out, and I'll--"
"Whattya have there, Mark--?"
Grant re-strapped his knife, looked. Five more men in hard-hats and boiler suits, some of them carrying bulging tool bags, were approaching along the platform.
Maintenance crew.
"Fella here's short of a train," the first man said.
Laughter from the crew. A half-cheery, half-annoyed "dumb, drunk bastard." As if on cue, lights came on along the tunnel. The inside of the tunnel. Grant stared into the suddenly illuminated maw, the ribbed, curved length stretching away like the dust-gray gullet of a giant snake. No sign of Lisa Reisert. None--
"Come on." Strong fingers gripped his shoulder. "Let's get you out of here--"
-- you dumb, drunk bastard.
*****
Grant stood outside the freshly locked exit of Holborn station, the black accordion gating at his back, the blank dark stares of two newsstands boarded for the night before him. He listened to the stationmasters making their way back down below, a clanking at the turnstiles, a clunking of footsteps on the stilled escalator. Both of them had walked him out. Obviously, he wasn't as harmless-seeming a drunk as he'd hoped.
He stepped to the corner, looked west along Holborn to Bloomsbury Court.
She couldn't have made it that far. She couldn't--
Right about now, those maintenance bastards should be finding themselves a grisly surprise on the westbound tracks. Leave them to it. Better that the dumb American drunk not stick around and become the number-one suspect in a killing on the Central Line.
The night's drizzle had turned to the morning's cold rain. Grant pulled up the collar of his coat, hunched his hands into his pockets, and started the hike back to his hotel. Away from Holborn station and the bookstore in Bloomsbury Court.
*****
"Jackson," said Carter, "this is Stanley Burton. He's our security contact at Transport for London. Stan, this is Jackson Rippner. It's his friend who's gone missing."
Rippner shook the hand the man called Burton offered him. He'd only just arrived at the Carters' suite at the Savoy. He was wet and cold and angry and frustrated, and he was in no mood for social pleasantries. Only fifteen minutes ago he'd been ejected by the closing crew at Leicester Square station, having run there after checking the myriad platforms underground at Piccadilly for signs of Lisa.
Burton read his tension. He was a short, square man, practically a block of muscle. His hair was going; what remained of it, he'd trimmed to gray thick bristles. Sharp blue eyes watched Rippner from gristly sockets in a broad, middle-aged face.
"Tell me something, Mr. Rippner--" Speaking, Burton gripped Rippner's hand for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. He had a gently rolling accent, not quite British, not quite Irish. "-- did you take more nonsense, growing up, over the fact that you're Polish-American, or because of idiots calling you 'Jack the Ripper'?"
His expression was equally curious and wry. Rippner felt a jolt of surprise, followed by respect. He recognized what the man was doing. He'd come bursting in, bristling with tension, and Burton was telling him to take a breath, to calm himself.
"I'm from Chicago, Mr. Burton. Being Polish there is practically a requirement."
"Ah, the second one, then. I'm Welsh, myself."
His tone implied companionable suffering. Burton released Rippner's hand, stepped aside. There in the sitting room behind him, a young man and woman in jeans and sweaters were setting up a makeshift command center of cables and laptops. Claire Carter was helping them. She looked over, offered Rippner a sympathetic smile of greeting.
"Stan and his helpers are patching us in to the CCTV system from London Transport," Carter said. "Tonight's video files as well as the live feeds from the underground stations."
Burton stepped over cables, checked screens and connections. "We could set up back at the offices, where the walls have ears as well as eyes, or Terry and Jane here can link us in where we stand. Closer to where your friend's gone missing, and they can shunt us past the traffic on the main servers. Fellows in programming dump cartloads of junk files through the system this time of night. Am I right, Jane?"
Jane nodded above a laptop screen. She had hair of indiscriminate dark blonde pulled back in a ponytail. She had also the tousled, slightly sleep-bewildered look of a girl summoned from bed, but she appeared to be enough of a tech-head to be getting a buzz out of hacking her own company's systems after-hours. "That you are, Mr. Burton."
"To our advantage, then," Burton continued, "three things: one, your friend-- Lisa Reisert, is it?-- has only now gone missing; two, we don't need to deal with a bored policeman telling us it's too soon to file a missing-persons; and, three, we've had no reports of anything untoward on the tracks tonight. Some sort of debris on the line east of St. Paul's: maintenance is checking on it; that's all. To our disadvantage: Miss Reisert could be anywhere from here to Cockfosters, assuming she stayed in the Tube. Making matters worse, John, Mr. Rippner, is one of London Transport's dirtiest little secrets: less than two thirds of a station's cameras are operational at any given time, the feeds from those cameras are unreliable on the best of days, and tonight the main feed from Leicester Square was scheduled for during-hours maintenance--"
"That's it," interrupted the boy called Terry. He was pale and black-haired, and he looked young enough to be Burton's grandson. "We're in, Mr. Burton. Feeds and bleeds, all screens."
"Thank you, Terry. One thing before we begin, just minor--" Burton looked from Carter to Rippner. "Might we see a picture of Miss Reisert--?"
The obvious thing. The most obvious. Rippner had no photo of her; he hadn't seen her put her passport in their room safe at the Aldwych. He looked to Carter.
Carter's face was very still. He went to the laptop that was most likely his, called now into service as part of their surveillance ring, and typed a password.
"There," he said.
Rippner looked, as Burton and the others did, at the JPEG file opening in a preview window from screen to screen around the room.
Two years ago, give or take. It was the first picture Rippner had taken of her. Lisa was crossing the street from the Lux Atlantic, on her way to lunch. It was a sunny Miami day; she was wearing a business dress in airy off-white linen. She was looking to the left, toward traffic--
-- toward him--
-- as she stepped between the taxis, the cars with their trunk lids open, loading and unloading, outside the hotel. He tried to tell himself that he was holding his breath because she might spot the camera-- less than the size and thickness of a credit card-- mounted on the back of the visor in his Beemer. He tried to tell himself that it was the danger of discovery making his heart beat faster, the bright daylight, a new, potential mark, a new mission--
He spoke into the mouthpiece of his phone as he transmitted the photo to Carter: "That's her, John."
A pause on the line. Then Carter said: That's a go, Jackson. We'll start a file for her on this end. Good luck.
*****
"This picture is two years old," Carter added, in the here and now, quietly.
"Has she changed since then?" Burton asked.
He looked at Rippner as he spoke. Rippner was still looking into the blue-gray eyes of the girl in the photo that Carter had kept, encrypted, on his laptop.
A salmon Caesar and a breadstick. A glass of iced green tea. No sugar. That was what she had for lunch.
"Her hair is a little shorter," he said. I'm hers now; she's mine. "Otherwise, she hasn't changed."
*****
Lisa existed only where the light defined her. She realized gradually, as she and Jim walked along the tracks, the dust shuffling against her boots, that the line separating her from darkness was thinning. How long they had been walking she didn't know. It might have been minutes or hours; the whispering was back in her head, here in the tunnel, and it was interfering with her sense of time.
She was tired. She felt herself dissipating into the blackness around them. No other way of describing it. Her legs were invisible to her, and she was losing feeling in them.
"Can we rest for a minute, Jim?"
Only when she saw that he had dropped to his haunches next to her did she realize she had fallen to her knees.
His expression was patient, his voice gentle. "Of course miss."
"Stay with me--?"
"I'll be right here, miss."
An exchange: the darkness around them for the darkness behind her eyelids. Lisa felt her shoulder impact against the dust-cold floor of the tunnel, between the tracks, and then she felt nothing else at all.
*****
"I've got something, Mr. Burton."
It was one-thirty a.m. Jane was handling the final feeds from Holborn station. Burton and Rippner and the rest left their own laptop screens and crowded in around her.
"Piccadilly Line," she said, "northbound service, eleven forty-two p.m."
On the screen, at a down-angle to the right, a train approached the camera, glided to a halt. The doors slid open, and in the grainy jerk of the black-and-white feed a woman bolted from the front car. Jane froze the image.
"There--"
"Can you enhance that?" Carter asked.
"No need," Rippner said. He knew the clothes Lisa had been wearing. He knew the bag she carried. He'd know the set of her shoulders, the lithe line of her back, anywhere. "It's her."
"There's more," Jane said. She unpaused the file. Lisa disappeared from the camera's range of view, vanished into one of the access tunnels leading from the platform. A second later, maybe two, Robert Grant burst from the doors of the car behind the one Lisa had exited.
"Whoever he is, it looks like he's--" Jane, seeing Rippner's face, stopped speaking. Rippner was staring at Carter.
"Do you know that man, Carter?" Burton asked.
"He's one of mine, Stan," Carter replied. He looked numb.
"Tell me you didn't know about this, John," Rippner said.
From his expression, Carter recognized the danger he was in. Rippner was looking at him with death in his eyes. At that very second, Carter had to know that he, Claire, Burton and his team: all of them were in terrible danger from the wiry could-be demon in their midst. "I didn't know, Jackson. I suspected he might be--"
"You suspected him?"
"I thought he might be on the take; I wasn't sure how; I'm still not--"
"You suspected him, and you-- you fucking called me, and didn't let me know, and you let me bring Lisa along as bait--?"
Claire unceremoniously shouldered in between them. No badly veiled bullshit threats for her. She leaned in for a closer look at Jane's screen. "Is there any more footage from Holborn?" she asked calmly.
"Nothing that shows Miss Reisert, ma'am." Jane stammered. She was still watching Rippner. "The cameras at Holborn are--"
"Grant, John," Rippner said. "He's not here. Where is he staying?"
"The Radisson off Seven Dials. Room six-twelve." Carter met Rippner's eyes grimly. "Maybe you should talk to him."
"I'll do that." A notepad and a pen lay on the table near Jane's right elbow. He took the pen. Retractable ballpoint, TRANSPORT FOR LONDON engraved in white on its black barrel. Rippner put it in his jacket pocket and left the Carters' suite.
*****
It was a twisting but short walk to the Radisson Mountbatten, through dark Covent Garden to the rain-slick cobblestones of Seven Dials. Access to the room floors was by key card only, but Rippner carried a Visa that was truer to its name than most credit cards: it gave him a ten-second green light in the elevator, which was more than enough time to punch the button for the sixth floor. Quiet, very quiet, when the doors opened. Late, or too early, by tourist standards, and the Mountbatten wasn't known as a party hotel. Grant was in a deluxe double near the end of the corridor, facing out over narrow Monmouth Street.
Rippner was alone in the passage. He sidled up to the door of Grant's room and listened--
A voice from inside. Not the television. Grant. He was saying--
"-- here in case Carter calls. He's expecting me to be here. Yes, he might call the room-- Morgan, would you-- You said yourself you didn't want me getting in the way down there--"
Morgan. Bill Morgan.
Rippner slotted his all-access Visa into the door lock. A pinprick of green light glowed in the tasteful night-gloom of the corridor.
"-- in case she-- No, I know: I know people can't outrun those fucking trains--"
The moment before Rippner pushed down on the door handle: such moments always reminded him of the old saw about seeing your life flash before your eyes when you die. A second of poised, frozen evaluation, when you chose whether to cross or to walk away from a threshold as figurative as it was literary. Grant might be standing just inside the door with a gun. The door itself might be booby-trapped.
Such hesitation was pointless. You acted, or you didn't; you died, or you didn't. All Rippner had to ask himself was whether he was acting blindly, out of rage, over Grant's potential role in Lisa's disappearance.
He wasn't. He felt calm. His heartbeat was as slow and steady as his breathing.
He pushed down on the handle, opened the door slightly. No chain. He entered Grant's room.
*****
Light from the room itself, but the entryway was dark. Rippner didn't start, seeing himself reflected in a wall-length mirror to his right. Grant was directly ahead, sitting in one of the room's two black-leather-padded chairs. On the round-topped table to his left sat a tumbler and an open bottle. Glenlivet. Ice and amber liquid in the glass.
He saw Rippner. "I'll get back to you," he said, and folded his phone. He set the phone on the table. "Hello, Rippner."
"Grant."
Grant reached unsteadily for the glass. "Aren't you going to thank me for being here--?"
"Where is she, Grant?"
"-- I mean, hell, I could've run." His words resounded wetly in the tumbler as he drank. "But you're Carter's little rat terrier, aren't you, Jack--? His rat-fucking-terrier. Anywhere I might've gone-- shit, there you'd be--"
"Why was she running from you?"
Grant set the tumbler down hard enough for it to slosh. He looked at Rippner with bleary offense in his shark-brown eyes. "She was messed up, Jack. I was trying to help her."
"Messed up on what, Grant? What did she have? What were you trying to get from her--?"
"Whoa-- hey, stop. One quesh-- question at a--" Grant tipped the bottle Rippner's way. "You want some of this--? I think there's another glass--"
"What were you trying to get from her?"
Grant poured himself more whiskey. "There are forces at work here, Jack. There's money at work here. More money than Carter and our bullshit company pay, that's for damn--" He drank, frowned. "I need more ice."
A black ice bucket stood on the room's dresser, to Rippner's right. Grant rose, glass in hand, and crossed to it. When a knife appeared suddenly in his free hand, Rippner wasn't surprised. Every second you spent wondering how weapons came to materialize was a second closer to being wounded or dead. He sidestepped the thrusting blade. He took the ballpoint from his jacket pocket, clicked it open, and slammed the sharp, fine tip deeply into Grant's throat just south of his jaw.
Grant gagged, coughed, clawed with his empty hand at the tube sticking from his neck. Rippner took the knife from him, set it on the dresser. He shoved Grant against the wall and looked into the man's wide eyes.
"A variation on a trick I picked up from Lisa," he said. Grant stared at him, wheezing. Panic and shock in his expression. He couldn't speak; he couldn't breathe. "She speared me in the trachea. I've hit your larynx, Bob. Unless I miss my guess, that's fatal."
For a moment, Grant focused. He tried to twist out of Rippner's grip. His hand went toward the knife now lying on the dresser. Up close, he smelled nearly nothing like whiskey: he'd been faking the drunkenness. Rippner braced one hand on Grant's jaw and the other on the back of the man's head and broke his neck.
Grant went limp. His panicked breathing stopped whistling past the hole in his larynx. Rippner lowered him to the floor. He took the knife. It was a fixed-blade Gerber fighting knife, balanced farther to the back than Rippner preferred, with a serrated blade. Rippner frowned, momentarily, in distaste. A serrated blade might do more damage, but it tended to snag on clothing or bone. A straight-edge blade was cleaner, quicker. Still, he couldn't be picky: he'd been on vacation, for Christ's sake. He wasn't carrying. He took the knife, found the sheath for it hanging underneath the chair where Grant had been sitting. He strapped the knife, sheathed, to his torso, under his jacket. He took Grant's phone, noted the last number Grant had called, and pocketed the phone without hitting redial. Bill, the name above the number said.
"Not very creative, Bob," Rippner muttered.
He washed his hands in the bathroom and left the room and the hotel. He was on his way north and east, through the maze of narrow streets quaint by day, eerie and quiet by rainy night, leading from Seven Dials to Holborn and the bookstore in Bloomsbury Court, when his own phone vibrated in his jeans pocket.
"You're out a manager, John," he said, before Carter had a chance to speak.
Where are you, Jackson?
"Heading to a bookstore in Bloomsbury Court. On Holborn, west of the station. Lisa and I followed Bill Morgan there yesterday; Grant was on the phone with him when I--"
Jackson--
"It's my one lead, John. Contact Professor Becker; make sure he's safe. And you'll want to get a cleanup crew over to the Radisson--"
Jackson, listen: it's about Lisa. That maintenance crew Burton mentioned, near St. Paul's--
Rippner stopped walking. He stepped into a paned doorway, out of the rain, stood facing the black windows of the shopfronts across the way. His heart hacked bluntly at the base of his throat. He half expected to hear the beat echoing along the wet cobblestones.
"Have they found her?"
They're, umm-- Carter hesitated. Rippner heard him swallow--
*****
They're not sure, Carter said.
*****