Seven

Jake forced himself to tear off a bite of turkey sandwich. He was trying to eat healthier these days, a losing battle for a guy reared on steak and lots of it. All those months of setting up the new business had kept him out of the gym, and he recently realized with alarm that his six-pack was morphing into a two-pack. Kelly had teased him, grabbing his middle and riffing about the slow march of time and declining metabolisms. Well, screw that. Jake Riley wasn’t giving in without a fight. Even if that meant switching to light beer and turkey.

He was in one of the ubiquitous sandwich factories lining the Berkeley campus, trying to get his mouth around a sandwich so stuffed with sprouts they should have named it the “Colon-Cleanser.” The place buzzed with students grabbing a bite between classes. Their tie-dyed shirts and Birkenstocks reminded him of when he first met Kelly, during an ugly case at a university. At least in the end something good had come out of it.

As he took in the fresh faces he experienced a pang: Madison Grant wasn’t much younger than these kids, another two years and she might have been among this crowd. He hoped to God she’d still get the chance, but based on the day he’d had so far, things were looking bleak.

The pressure was compounded by the fact that if Randall was telling the truth, more than just Madison ’s life hung in the balance. Jake preferred to think he was just blowing smoke up their asses, trying to make sure they did everything possible to find his daughter. But a small voice in the back of his head argued that Randall was scared enough to risk his job and reputation by trusting them rather than Homeland Security. The lab he was working in had produced most of the major advances in military hardware in the past century, along with biochemical weapons that could wipe out civilization as we know it. And whoever had stolen Madison Grant was a pro: not only were they good at covering their tracks, there were almost none to speak of.

Syd and what he referred to as her “shadow network” had diligently run down every lead, no matter how tenuous. There was a moment of excitement when the license plate trace turned up a limo company based in South San Francisco. But that died down fifteen minutes later, when Syd got a faxed copy of the stolen car report. And ten minutes after that they learned that the final destination of the Lincoln Town Car had been a chop shop in Oakland. It was currently being returned to the limo company owner in pieces.

Jake had immediately headed over to the chop shop, driving through a section of Oakland that closely resembled war-torn Beirut. A few guys were hard at work on an Escalade. It took a few hundred to convince them he wasn’t a cop, and a few hundred more to find out where they got the car. If they were telling the truth, when they showed up at work three nights ago it was sitting in front of their garage, keys in the ignition, like a gift from the gods. And they knew better than to question it.

Syd had considered calling in a favor, trying to get the remaining parts dusted for prints, but Jake convinced her otherwise. They’d probably end up with the oily imprints of a few grand theft auto felons. Whoever possessed the car before them was too careful to be that sloppy, it had probably been detailed inside and out before materializing in Oakland. Syd was running a background check on everyone at the limo company in case it was an inside job, but so far they’d turned up clean. So he was sitting here choking down a sandwich while he waited for Syd to call.

Jake rubbed his face. They had two leads left to follow: the shadowy image of the driver’s face, and the mythical Shane’s e-mail account. At the moment he wasn’t holding out much hope for either. Facial recognition software was notoriously unreliable even when you had a good image to work with, and good didn’t describe what they had. As for the e-mail address, computers weren’t his thing, but he knew that any hacker worth his salt could bounce messages through dozens of servers worldwide, rendering them untraceable.

Jake’s phone buzzed and he tossed the sandwich back on its biodegradable plate, strewing a comet trail of sprouts. “Hey, Syd. What have you got?”

There was a pause before she replied, “Not much, I’m afraid. All the texts trace back to a disposable phone. I managed to track down its batch number. It was sold to a Walgreens distributor in the Bay Area, but from there it could have gone to a dozen different stores. And whoever purchased it probably paid cash.”

“So the number kept switching?” Jake asked. “Why wouldn’t that make Madison suspicious?”

He could almost see her shrugging. “Don’t know. She’s a bright girl-according to Randall she’s some sort of mechanical genius-but he must have given her a rational explanation.”

“What about the e-mails?”

“Same deal. Bounced all over the damned place, last location we got was somewhere on the Caspian coast.”

“Which country?”

“ Turkmenistan.”

Jake’s brow furrowed. Could this be the link? Maybe some foreign power stole the kid to force Randall to share intel. It would certainly explain the level of organization, and the deep pockets. Syd’s voice interrupted his train of thought. “What’re you thinking?”

“You worked that part of the world, right?”

There was a lengthy pause. Officially they’d decided not to discuss past cases unless absolutely necessary. As far as Jake was concerned, this was the exception to that rule. Apparently Syd agreed, because after a moment she said, “I was stationed in Tbilisi for a few months.”

“That’s a little off the grid, isn’t it?”

“Way off the grid. Officially we were afraid that some of the decommissioned nuclear arms weren’t being appropriately monitored and might fall into the hands of rogue nations. Unofficially, I was being punished for not sleeping with my boss when he asked me to.”

Jake decided to ignore that last part. “What do you think? Any chance we’re dealing with a group that’s trying to get hold of some nukes?”

Syd went so long without saying anything, Jake was concerned he’d lost the connection. “Hello?”

“I’m still here. I’m just thinking.”

“Ah, Christ. You know something,” Jake said. “What the hell, Syd-”

“Nothing specific, I just…I’ve got some idea what Randall has been working on these past few months. And it might tie in with that.”

An image of the driver’s face flashed through Jake’s mind. Big white guy, could definitely be Slavic. “Great. I agreed to take this case, against my better instincts, as a favor to you. And you keep me in the dark. That’s it.” He resolutely pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “Call Randall, tell him I’m getting on a plane. You want to help him, come out here yourself.”

“Jake, wait-”

“Nope. I’m done, Syd.”

“All right.”

Jake paused at the door to the sandwich shop, rental car keys in hand. It wasn’t like Syd to give in so easily. “Bullshit.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe for a minute you’re letting me off the hook.”

“No, you’re right. I promised that the minute it smelled bad, you could back down. Besides, if this Turkmenistan thing is the real deal, I can follow up just as well from here. The Bay Area part of this operation seems dead in the water anyway. Just because she got off a plane there doesn’t mean anything, she could be on a container ship halfway to China by now.”

Jake had thought the same thing, but there was something about her tone he didn’t trust. Besides, if they’d wanted Madison on a container ship, it would have been just as easy to yank her from the East Coast. Even easier, maybe. The truth was that despite his posturing, he wasn’t ready to ditch Madison Grant yet. He walked to the car, as if physically calling Syd’s bluff. “Okay. So I’ll head to the airport.”