1
Lincoln paced the office, the whole time the governor was on the phone. It was unbearable not to move. The kidnapper's voice, a friendly neighbor who knocks on your door to borrow sugar. The horrible things he made Frank confess to.
What is she to you?
A junkie and a criminal.
She's done nothing but get in the way, from the beginning.
Then that woman's screams.
God. Right this second, Lincoln wished he weren't a policeman. Wished he could grab Frank Tancredi by the shoulders and shake him, smash his fist into his face.
If he'd just done as the kidnappers asked—
They might have tortured and killed her, anyway, a voice in his head finished. When he looked back at Frank, after the call ended, his face was the color of mortar. He'd aged ten years in the past ten minutes. Still sympathy could not crawl past Lincoln's anger.
How did you not do everything in your power to save your daughter? Even just to save an innocent woman?
"Michael," Lincoln said. "You're still on the phone?"
"Yes."
His brother's calm right now was almost as unbearable as the governor's face. "What do we do? Fuck, what do we do?"
Lincoln smashed his fist against the desk. Papers flew and a dull thud filled the room. The table was massive mahogany, no made in China stuff. It was unbefitting of his badge, such a gratuitous show of violence, and Lincoln cursed himself for it. But the governor just stared into the distance, not seeming to have noticed.
"Obviously," Michael said, "we can't go through with the plan."
"Yeah! Obviously."
"Governor," Michael said. "Can you hear me?"
Frank took a moment to answer. His hands lay on his lap, the phone dangling absently. "Yes."
"I realize you went through something traumatic," Michael said.
Lincoln couldn't hold back a scoff. "I think his daughter went through something traumatic," he muttered. A bitter taste swam up his mouth as he recalled the kidnapper's words. About Frank deserving what had just happened.
Michael ignored him. "But it's important we're all clear on our next move."
"Yes," Frank said again, his voice taking slightly deeper roots inside his body.
"And what is that, Michael?" Lincoln said. "What's our next move?"
"We're going to do what the kidnapper said. At eight, release a statement. Go through social media, so it's immediate. Then you can talk to the press and elaborate."
"But—"
"Governor," Michael interrupted. Lincoln couldn't believe the lack of judgment in his voice. "This is no longer a situation where you can try to save your daughter and your career. You understand that? The man we're up against isn't kidding around. And he's angry. We can do everything he asks and he might still kill Sara. In fact, it's likely that he'll try to."
Frank opened his mouth, and closed it. "I—I hired you to save my daughter."
A beat of silence, at the other end of the line. "Believe me, governor. That's what I intend to do."
2
Michael hung up the phone and stood in absolute silence. Minutes passed, ten, fifteen, twenty. The blueprints he'd been studying lay scattered on the desk of the motel room he'd rented, just outside Palmer. There was nothing to do but think.
In a way, he was back to square one.
He might know the name of the kidnapper—at least, his cover. And where he lived. But the kidnapper knew that he knew, and that made things a lot more dangerous.
He's going to move her. If I get in a car, rush to his apartment and follow him, he'll know he's being tailed. The guy's a pro. And he'll do—
The woman's scream drilled through Michael's thoughts, the memory of it just as real as the first time he heard it. Nails sank into his palms, fists dug into his thighs.
He couldn't get distracted.
Those screams were a distraction.
Burning through his braincells, in that unrelenting, magical way that only ice can burn. Sara. A name that didn't mean anything to him, three days ago, but that had stamped itself onto his soul, crimson red, mistake red.
What risks had she taken, to slip him that clue during their phone conversation? Maybe she had been kidnapped, and he had been the one following the strawberry-blond glow of her Ariadne's thread. Yet finding her had not been a one-way street. More of a dance, really. Her taking one step, leading him in the right direction. Michael, trying to understand the whole choreography just from how she swayed, almost imperceptibly, not to draw attention.
She played all her cards. Went all in. The gamble was her life.
And he had failed her.
Intrusive thoughts stabbed through the wall of his concentration. A trapeze artist, jumping into the void, and the man, below, failing to catch her. Ballerinas twirling round and round, trying to stop, but the ground collapsing beneath their feet.
Every image played to the soundtrack of her screams.
And the kidnapper's voice—Did it feel personal?
Michael ran his hands over his scalp, nails biting into stubble and flesh. "Think. Think."
Emotions, tugging at the chords of his composure, stopped him from using this phone conversation as he should. Past the horror of this woman's pain, the unforgiveable unwinding of Michael's mistake—there must be something he could use about that phone call.
He replayed it, into his head, word for word. This time, there was no information to glean about the environment. Michael had been inside the building, had seen Owen Kravecki with his own eyes. The knowledge that he could go there right now, and find Sara, gnawed at the edges of his sanity.
Except if Michael showed up in that street, if any car that the kidnapper found remotely suspicious drew near—
"He'll kill her."
Michale closed his eyes.
This isn't how I save her.
So Michael put himself through every insufferable second of that phone conversation. Though he recorded it, he didn't press play on the audio. There was no need. His memory waltzed him backward, pausing on every detail, a peculiar inflexion or tonality, an odd choice of word.
Forget the apartment. Forget Sara, the screams.
What did this conversation teach him about Owen Kravecki?
All those assumptions he'd made, getting under the governor's skin. Bringing up how he felt about his own daughter—or didn't feel.
I want you to believe me when I say this was the mistake of your life, the one regret you'll take to the grave.
Hurting Sara, for all of them to hear—it wasn't just a professional, carrying out a task on his employer's behalf. It could have been. But it wasn't.
Michael sensed it, in the slight spike in the man's voice, when he addressed them. Taunted them.
What's going to take place? When you hear that woman scream from pain… I hope it feels personal, to you, as well.
"He called me," Michael said. "This all happened so fast, he had to act quickly. Had to make his point, to make sure we didn't send our team in for a hopeless rescue. Yet before he set out to torture her, he called me. To tease me. To show he'd outwitted me."
Michael sucked in his bottom lip, soothed by the dull pain of blood draining.
What does this tell you, Michael?
"That he's like me," he said. "That he can't stand mistakes."
Clarity started to seep back into Michael's head. Yes. He went back over every sentence the man had spoken to him. You blew my cover. You've seen my face. The tinge of superiority, gliding with confidence, a voice that made you feel that you were drowning in hot honey.
"He's smart," Michael said. "Real smart. But he's also proud. To his own eyes, he's not a sadist. He didn't enjoy torturing Sara. He enjoyed torturing me."
He thought of the round, ordinary face, the generous tip he gave Michael for his order.
"The tip."
Michael scrambled for the door, where the jacket he'd worn yesterday dangled from the coatrack. The face of Ulysses Grant stared paternalistically at him.
In God We Trust.
Michael chuckled, and picked up his cell. Five a.m. But the person he had in mind would be awake.
"Hello?" Jerry picked up on the first ring.
"It's me," Michael said. "Are you at the office?"
'The office' was how Michael and his colleagues referred to their workplace. It added a layer of mundane over the reality of being a CIA agent.
"Yep," Jerry said. "Still on that top-secret mission?"
"Yeah, it just got secreter. Listen, I'm going to beat traffic. I'll be at the office in an hour and half. There's some fingerprints I need to run by you. Urgent, under-the-table. Not going through any bureaucratic hoops. Can you do that for me?"
"Well, I don't like to say no to a guy I owe a hundred bucks to."
"A hundred and fifty."
"Right. So, you seem in a hurry. You do know even with our technology, this is gonna take time, right? If the guy's fingerprints are even in our database."
Michael smiled, gathering his things into a bag with one hand. "I'll narrow it down for you. This guy I want? He won't be in the system. He'll have been deleted from it, actually."
Laughter, at the other end of the line. "You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. He's been in the military, most likely." Owen Kravecki's posture, straight as an arrow. The ring he wore on his index. "In the neighborhood of forty. He might have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. We're talking a pristine record—someone good enough he got tapped on the shoulder by the right people, one day."
"Like you did?"
Michael clenched his jaw. "Yeah. Like I did."
"It's not gonna be easy, you know. Finding someone who got erased from history."
"You know what?" Michael slipped the fifty-dollar bill between two sheets of plastic, careful to touch it as little as possible. "You find him for me, and not only do we forget the hundred and fifty you owe me—but there's a fifty in there for you to keep."
"Well, I'll see what I can do. Be careful, Mike."
"Bye, Jerry."
Michael hung up, smiling at the banknote.
In God We Trust.
"Well," he said, "we have to trust in something."