Jack smiled uncomfortably. They sat in silence, drinking the rest of their Heinekens. The forest was alive with the rustling of squirrels and birds foraging for winter stores. A gentle breeze was enough to stir the dry leaves on the trees. A slow motion shower of color floated through the air as leaves twirled in a death dance on the way to the ground. Sarah’s little voice came from the table behind them, serenading them with the theme song from one of her cartoon shows.
Max put down his beer. “I’d better get going. Kristi will think I’m out chasing another woman.” He waved through the window to say goodbye to Lauren and he and Jack headed down the path that led around the house.
“Daddy, you said you’d do numbers with me!” Sarah called out.
“I’m telling Uncle Max goodbye. I’ll be right there.”
Max shook his head, “And the Father of the Year award goes to…”
“I’m making up for lost time,” Jack said. Again he cringed. Everything seemed somehow to tie into Jesse’s imminent death. They continued around the house in silence.
Max hesitated in front of his car. “Listen, why don’t you cool it a little about this girl in the trunk? At least until they find a body or something. I’ll try to calm Janney down. I know him pretty well. We can just make this whole thing go away.”
“My mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. There was a girl and I’m going to find out what happened to her.”
Max locked eyes with Jack. For a second, Jack thought he saw a flash of anger in his friend’s eyes. But just as quickly it passed. Max hit him on the shoulder. “You are a stubborn S.O.B., aren’t you? At least think about what I said. O.K.?”
Jack told him he would and then watched his friend go up the driveway and disappear through the trees. He walked back down the path to the rear of the house and climbed up on to the deck.
Sarah called out when she saw him, “Look at what I did, Daddy. Look!”
Jack smiled and prepared himself to ohh and ahh at her most recent set of scribbles. His smile disappeared when he saw the papers scattered in front of her.
There were over a dozen sheets spread out on the table. The crayons were dumped out of the box into a pile in front of her.
Every sheet was covered with numbers.
Written in different sizes.
Different colors.
Jack picked up some of the papers and turned them over. The backs were just as full. Perfectly formed numbers covered every blank space.
It was the same number.
Over and over.
320.
Nate Huckley’s hospital room.
And in the center of every page, written in large, block letters, was a single word.
TWENTY-FOUR
Perched in a tree stand, the man adjusted his scope to focus on the figure on the deck. The target was agitated about something, holding pieces of paper up in the air. The man knew the little girl was Sarah Tremont. The records he’d copied at Midland Hospital said the older sister Becky had been treated for a broken arm. The 3X9 Bushnell scope clearly showed the girl on the deck did not have a cast.
The target picked up the girl and went inside. The man did not have interior surveillance so he climbed out on the thick branch below him and wrenched the tree stand away from the main trunk. Moving slowly in case anyone was looking out of the house windows in his direction, he climbed down the tree until he was ten feet from the ground. He threw the tree stand and his black duffel bag into a thick bush that absorbed the equipment with minimum noise. A soft push off the trunk and the man dropped from the tree, rolling on impact and ending in a crouched position.
The man shook his head. Too much noise. He was getting sloppy.
He grabbed his things from the bush and started the trek back to his car. The hike gave him time to consider his next move. He had so little information to go on. Nothing more than instinct. But time meant everything right now and if he was going to make a difference he had to move quickly.
The visit from Max Dahl had been a surprise. He’d have to do some research to find out how close he and Jack Tremont were. The man didn’t have audio but the conversation had looked tense at times as he followed it through the scope.
Then there was the little girl, Sarah. He was angry at himself for not watching her at all while the men spoke. Tremont’s reaction when he returned to the deck made him wonder what was on those papers. If he had only paid attention, then he might have known for sure instead of trying to make decisions with inadequate information.
Just like old times, he thought. His entire career had been one situation after another that demanded he make life and death decisions with limited knowledge. He was trained not to think of it as guessing, but rather as interpreting ground truth. The same training taught him the semantics of his profession. He didn’t kill men, but eliminated his targets. He never hurt innocent bystanders; he incurred collateral damage. But the wordplay never changed the reality of the missions he was ordered to carry out. Death was still death, no matter what label it wore.
He thought he would be glad to be done with the military, but in some ways he longed for it. A world of absolutes. Clear objectives. Orders that came without the need for interpretation or the inconvenience of exercising moral judgment. Now everything seemed grey and the confidence he usually felt on a mission was gone, replaced with almost paralyzing uncertainty. The superstitions he ran away from his entire life were coming back. The walls of denial, painstakingly built up since childhood, were crashing down around him. He faced a new enemy and it was one he did not understand, one he did not want to believe existed. All he knew was that this new enemy created in him an emotion he thought he had killed off long ago.
Fear.
Enough fear to catch him up for a lifetime.
The more he learned about his enemy the more he wondered if he was up to the task. He did not fear death, that emotion had long been torn from him, but he feared failure. He worried that his enemy was too powerful for him, too smart, had too many advantages. He worried that revenge was clouding his judgment.
Despite all this, the man was committed to going through with his mission. He had gathered enough intelligence. It was time to act. And time to decide if killing Jack Tremont was part of his solution.
TWENTY-FIVE
Lauren and Jack sat side by side at the kitchen table, the sheets of construction paper spread out in front of them. The number 320 screamed off the sheets, written in multiple sizes and styles. Sarah also sat at the table, wrapping a lock of hair around her little finger, her eyes wide, waiting for her parents to speak.
“Sarah, honey.” Lauren said softly. “These numbers look really great.”
Sarah smiled at the compliment. The way her folks were acting she thought she was in trouble for something. She reached out to pick up one of the sheets of paper. Lauren came out of her chair and blocked her daughter’s hand, “No! Don’t touch it.” Jack gripped his wife’s arm and eased her back in her chair.
“I’m sorry, Mommy. What did I do?”
“Nothing sweetie.” Lauren motioned for Sarah to come sit on her lap. Sarah slid off her chair and walked over to nestle into her mother’s arms. Lauren rocked her back and forth. “I’m sorry I snapped at you sweetie. Do you forgive me?” Sarah nodded.
“Sarah, where did you learn how to write your numbers so well?” Jack said.
Sarah looked at her dad and then over at the papers on the table. She cocked her head to the side as if realizing for the first time that it was strange that the numbers looked so much better than anything she had ever done before. They looked like an adult did them. She turned back to her dad and shrugged.