Luke looked back into the SUV’s cargo area. On top of the students’ luggage sat a lumpy green duffel bag. After watching it for several seconds, one of the lumps moved — just barely, but Luke’s eye caught it. He hoped the lump didn’t cough.
Five minutes later they reached the front of the line. As if on cue, the agent waved the RV in front of them over to the side of the road. After looking at their car and glancing at the license plate, the agent started to wave them through, then suddenly held his hand out. He walked to the open driver’s window and asked for the driver’s ID.
While the student was pulling out his wallet, the agent glimpsed into the driver-side footwell, then looked past Luke into the rear cargo area. “You folks have anything to declare?”
The driver shook his head while handing his driver’s license to the agent. “Nope.”
The agent said something about driving safely as he handed back the license and waved them through the checkpoint, but Luke was too distracted to listen.
He was searching his mind for an innocent reason why Sammy’s number would be out of service. He couldn’t summon one.
Luke tightened his grip on the steering wheel until his fingers blanched. “I’m going to hunt down whoever did this.”
His chest heaved and he slammed a fist against the dashboard.
Megan flinched.
They were driving west on Interstate 8 in an old Ford Bronco they’d stolen minutes after the students dropped them at a Greyhound station in El Centro, California. Luke had found the SUV on a tree-lined side street and chosen it for its heavily tinted glass and a wing window that he easily pried open with the screwdriver he’d bought a few minutes earlier at a hardware store. After switching license plates with a Toyota Camry parked behind it, he had broken open the Bronco’s steering column, located the linkage rod, and played with it until the engine finally turned over.
“Maybe your father and Dr. Wilson decided to hide out someplace else,” she said with no conviction. “Maybe they’re okay.”
Ten minutes earlier they had stopped at a convenience store and Luke called the lodge in Big Bear Lake. The person at the front desk explained that Drs. McKenna and Wilson had each made four-day reservations beginning yesterday, but neither had arrived. Megan’s call to Ben’s home found his wife in a panic, wondering why her husband hadn’t come home the previous night.
Luke’s mind was afire.
“They’re not hiding out,” he said. “Ben wouldn’t have left his family. Someone grabbed them. If Calderon got hold of them…” He didn’t finish his thought. He wouldn’t say aloud that his father and Ben might be dead.
“What do you think happened?” Megan asked.
“I don’t know. My father’s not exactly subtle. Maybe Caleb talked to him, picked up on something.”
“It’s crazy. How does Caleb think he can get away with this?”
Luke had the same question. Abducting his father and Ben was a risky move, one that would draw in the police. Everything that Caleb and his cabal had done before now — framing Luke, drawing him to Guatemala — was a carefully scripted strategy to divert attention away from their activities.
If CHEGAN was acting out of desperation, if this had been done recklessly, he knew that his father and Ben were already dead.
There was another possibility, though. Caleb might be using Elmer and Ben as bait — drawing Luke in, taunting him, reminding him that he was tethered like a puppet. If that was Caleb’s strategy, the implied message was also clear. Come alone.
That Luke had no allies in this battle was a given. He couldn’t go to the police. The detectives would lock him up, at least until they had vetted his story. His father would be dead long before he could ever turn the investigation toward Caleb.
Even Sammy had abandoned him.
Or worse.
Downtown L.A. was coming into view when Luke transitioned onto the 10 Freeway at 2:47 on Friday afternoon.
Megan broke into his reverie. “What’ve you been thinking about for the past hour?”
In the rearview mirror, Frankie’s head was bobbing in sleep.
“A guy I trusted — Sammy Wilkes. I think he set me up.”
“Who is he?”
“I’m not sure.” Luke described the many faces of Sammy: the cocky young soldier who, during missions, wore a countenance as dark as his skin; the man who hid his Ivy-league intellect behind an urban ghetto persona; the man who seemed to talk only about himself without ever letting you know who he was.
Then he explained: “Wilkes showed up right after that private investigator — the one hired by Erickson — started tailing me. Sammy was probably already watching me when he spotted the P.I., then approached me with a phony story about the football player’s attorney contacting him. Sammy played me perfectly, like he was looking out for me. I fell for it.”
“You think Wilkes is working for Calderon?”
“Probably the other way around. Wilkes is right here in L.A. and has a good-sized operation. Caleb probably hired him to run CHEGAN’s security.”
Megan pointed at a California Highway Patrol cruiser several car lengths in front of them.
Luke had already seen it and slowed. The Bronco had probably already been reported stolen, and he had to hope the Camry owner whose license plates he was using didn’t notice that someone had switched plates. Even then, the switch provided only the shallowest ruse, protecting them from nothing more than a cursory check against a list of stolen plates. Any cop who took the time to run their plates would immediately discover that they didn’t match the make and model of the vehicle Luke was driving.
“Calderon used to work for Sammy and probably still does jobs for him. Sammy’s probably using him as his hammer, and I walked right into it.”
Luke waited for an eighteen-wheeler to pass on their right.
“When I didn’t let go of the autopsies, it was probably Sammy’s idea to set me up for the Erickson murder. He’s clever enough to think up something like that. The bastard was two moves ahead of me. He even told me what he was doing. Just before I left the U.S., he said, ‘They’re reeling you in.’ Those were his words. He knew because he was the one doing it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“There’re other things that point to him. The fact that he wanted me to contact Calderon, and did it himself before I told him to. He probably thought I wasn’t going to take the bait.” Luke shot a glance at Megan. “And the men who followed me to the Zenavax lab — Sammy could have had me fixed with a GPS transponder and given them my coordinates.”
Luke thought about the satellite phone that Sammy had given him, and how easily a transponder could have been inserted into it.
“We can’t fight these people alone,” Megan said. “There are too many of them.”
“Not ‘we’—me. This is my war.”
Luke stared at the traffic ahead, but he could feel Megan’s gaze.
“These people want you dead,” she said. “If you keep giving them chances, eventually they’re going to succeed.”
Her words clung to him like a spiderweb as he cut across two lanes and took the Western Avenue exit.
59
It was 3:14 P.M. when Luke pulled over and parked along a tree-lined residential street that dead-ended into the roadway running along the rear of University Children’s. Fifty yards beyond the end of the Bronco’s hood was the hospital’s loading dock.
Luke and Megan crawled into the backseat with Frankie. The charcoal-tinted side windows would shield them from casual glances by passersby, but they were still visible through the windshield.