“That’s it?”
“Look, you had a good hunch and I let you follow up on it. Turns out it was a goose chase. Now, we need you back here.”
A few seconds of silence passed between them without Graham’s response.
“Dan?”
“Give me a day or so to wrap some things up, all right?”
“Wrap it up and get back here, ASAP. That’s an order. No more surprises.”
The call ended.
That was it.
Six Seconds 285
Graham ran his hand over his face.
Was he right to pursue this the way he did? To the point that he’d stepped into a domestic whirlwind with a parental abduction and a near suicide. Had he let emotion and speculation serve as substitutes for evidence? In reality, a lot of threads never made sense in a case.
In life, we never get all of our questions answered.
But he was convinced the facts in this case just didn’t add up.
It didn’t matter now. It was over.
Graham noticed Hayley waiting a respectful distance away. He gave her a little smile. Might as well wrap things up. Check in on Maggie. Say hello and goodbye. Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans for his leather-bound notebook, he joined Hayley and she escorted him to Maggie’s room.
A nurse was standing at Maggie’s bed, reviewing a chart. Graham introduced himself, showed his ID. The doctors had already cleared him to visit.
“I’d like to talk to Officer Graham alone, please,” Maggie said.
After the nurse and Hayley left, Graham sat in the chair next to Maggie. Her skin was pale, raw. Her reddened eyes reflected her anguish. Her knuckles whitened as she clenched and unclenched a tissue she held in her fist.
“They said that I would’ve died if you hadn’t found me.” A fragile smile flashed. “Thank you for saving my life.”
He nodded.
“I guess they told you a bit about my situation,” she said.
“A bit.”
286 Rick Mofina
Graham summarized what he’d learned from Detec tive Thompson, then Maggie told him the rest, ending with questions.
“Why did you come all this way to my house? Does it have something to do with my husband and son?”
“I’m not sure. Do you know of a reporter from Wash ington, D.C., named Ray Tarver?”
“A reporter in Washington? No. Has this got some thing to do with Jake?”
“I don’t know.”
Graham told her only what he could about the Tarvers, starting with the tragedy in the mountains. Maggie brushed away more tears. Then Graham ex plained how his discovery of Jake and Maggie’s name and address in Tarver’s notes led him to California.
“I needed to talk to you, to Jake, to see what the connection might be. What do you know about your husband’s time in Iraq?”
Maggie thought for a moment.
“Sometimes his convoys came under fire. Some thing happened to him over there, but he refused to talk about it. He had nightmares, he brooded and there was the outburst.”
“What do you know about the types of missions he drove on?”
“Nothing. He never talked about it the whole time he was back. And, as far as I know, nothing got in the press. He was damaged when he came home, he was withdrawn, mistrustful. Not the same man. It took a toll on me and Logan.”
Maggie stared at the ceiling looking for the rest of the words.
Six Seconds 287
“We tried hard to work things out. Now he’s gone. He took Logan and now I have no one. I have nothing. It’s like they died.”
Maggie’s whispered voice cracked.
“I just want to find them. I need to find them.” “I know.”
“Help me, please.”
“Help you?”
“Help me find my son and husband.”
“Me? But I can’t get involved. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“ You found me. You came all the way from that river in the mountains and you found me. Please.” “I’m sorry.”
“Please help me!”
Maggie released a heartbreaking shriek. Graham glanced at the door.
“I have no one, please!”
He shifted awkwardly in his chair.
“Will you help me? Please help me!”
He tried to calm her, to stem her rising hysteria. He took her hand.
Like Emily Tarver in the Faust River, this woman was drowning.
Graham had to make a decision.
And he had to make it now.
46
Blue Rose Creek, California
While Graham was in the hospital helping Maggie Conlin, his parked car was being studied by two men who’d followed him from her neighborhood to the hospital.
No one noticed the strangers loitering around his sedan parked in a shaded corner of Inland Center Hos pital’s large, north lot, which was nearly filled to capacity.
The men were in their late twenties, clean-cut, dressed casually and wearing dark glasses. Visitors passing by saw nothing unusual as the pair leaned against the van next to Graham’s car.
They appeared interested in the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
But occasionally they spoke in low tones as they ignored the paper to scan the interior of Graham’s rental, looking for anything to answer their questions.
Who was he? Why did he visit Maggie Conlin? Why was she taken to hospital?
The taller man, Faker, was a doctoral student at UCLA visiting from Amsterdam. He was studying re
Six Seconds 289 ligious philosophy. Faker, a U.S. citizen, had lived largely in Dubai, Bahrain and Doha with his father, an oil executive from Houston. When Faker rejected his family, he wandered the world in search of answers to life.
He found them in the extreme anti-West movements of European campuses.
His friend, Sid, was raised in Brooklyn, New York. A deeply introverted young man, Sid had been aban doned as a young boy and raised in foster homes where he’d been abused. As a teen, he sought solace in a number of storefront religious groups before he ulti mately left for Afghanistan, where he joined the Taliban.
Faker and Sid were believers.
They were also security agents for the network’s most important project. Their job was to ensure nothing threatened its success.
“Sid, there. See?”
On the passenger seat, under a corner of an open map, luggage tags from Graham’s carry-on bag peeked out, offering them his name and address. Quickly, they made notes, including the letters RCMP-GRC, which framed one of the tags.
The men then vanished into their vehicle some distance away but within sight of Graham’s car.
Behind the darkened windows of their vehicle they worked very fast on laptop computers, using search engines, news databases and Web sites.
Within minutes they learned the stranger who had visited Maggie Conlin was Daniel Graham, a corporal with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada. Graham was from Alberta and, according to news reports, part of the investigation into the sudden deaths of Ray Tarver, the reporter from Washington, D.C., and his family.
“They’re getting close,” Faker said. “We should alert our uncle.”
Faker reached for their satellite phone and in seconds his call bounced off satellites orbiting miles above the earth to a secured series of relays in Istanbul, Vienna, Prague, Casablanca, Lagos then to Addis Ababa.
The scrambled signal remained beyond the immedi ate reach of the NSA security net. When the call was answered in Africa, it was followed by a cryptic con versation in an ancient language.
“Hello, uncle, this is your nephew in California.”
“Yes, and how is the family?”
“They’re fine for now, but we have some news. We may not be able to go forward with the event. A stain has been found on Grandmother’s carpet.”
A few moments of silence passed before Faker con tinued.