The Cornwalls Are Gone Read online

  That’s it.

  “Daddy, what about Mister Banjo?”

  He walks back and forth, back and forth, working out the kinks in his legs and arms. The events of the past hours keep on running back and forth in his mind, like a defective DVD that skips and repeats the same scene.

  A regular day at home. Denise in the kitchen, running the blender, making a fruit smoothie, having just changed and dumped her soccer clothes in the bathroom, with a promise that she’ll pick them up, real-soon-now. He in his office, supposedly doing research on his book, but going down a YouTube rabbit hole showing black-and-white science-fiction movie clips from the 1950s. Looking out the window, seeing a red van make a turn in a driveway two homes down.

  Back to YouTube, seeing old footage of a V-2 rocket launching from White Sands, pretending to be a moon rocket. Hearing a vehicle come into the driveway, leave, and then return.

  Doorbell rings. He gets up, goes to the door.

  Whirring sound of the blender.

  Open the door to two smiling yet nervous men wearing gray jumpsuits, one of them holding a clipboard, and the one on the left, in an accented voice, says, “Sir? We’re here for the carpet cleaning?”

  Situational awareness.

  It all comes right to him at that moment.

  The men are nervous, jittery, their dark-skinned faces sweaty.

  He and Amy haven’t ordered a carpet-cleaning service.

  This is wrong.

  He smiles at the two men, starts closing the door, knowing the gun safe is right at his shoulder, and says, “Sorry, there must be some mistake.”

  No more smiles, no more nervousness.

  The larger of the two men snaps out something in a foreign language, and they break in, and now it’s like a bad dream that’s only getting worse, and he shouts, “Denise! Run!”

  Then on the floor, gasping, legs and arms trembling, as some sort of Taser-like device is being pushed into his ribs. He’s thrown on his stomach, hands and feet are being bound, and in a high-pitched voice that will haunt him to his deathbed, he hears Denise screaming.

  He fades in and out. He’s rolled into something. It goes dark. He’s lifted up. Dropped. Movement. Engine sounds. Stops and starts, stops and starts. More lifting. Engine sounds.

  Lifting up and down, up and down.

  Then…

  Unwrapped in this room by the same two men, plastic ties cut away, Denise sobbing next to him, long hours trying to calm her down…

  Knowing they are trapped, knowing he is in the greatest danger of his life, and also knowing he has put his ten-year-old girl in a depth of jeopardy he dares not even consider.

  CHAPTER 8

  NOW, IN their concrete prison, trying not to obsess over his mistakes that got them here.

  Right now, trying not to panic in front of the little girl who’s depending on him to make it all right.

  “Daddy! Mister Banjo!”

  Her scream cuts through his thinking, his memories, and another chunk of guilt has just been added to the monument piling up in his gut.

  “Sorry, hon,” he says.

  He goes over, sits down on the cot next to Denise. He strokes her back, looks around at their surroundings. Where are they? He’s not sure. He was so out of sorts for such a long time that he has no idea if it’s been three or six or nine hours since their kidnapping.

  He tried talking, reasoning, and even begging the two men who deposited them here, taking the unrolled carpets with them.

  He tries to remember the word the larger man said back at the house. Middle Eastern, of course, but he didn’t understand it.

  And his wife, Amy, a captain in military intelligence.

  Lots of puzzle pieces out there.

  “I’m sorry, hon, who’s Mister Banjo?”

  Her voice is filled with accusation. “I already told you!”

  Tom grits his teeth, tries to keep it together. “I’m sorry, hon. Could you tell me again?”

  Tears come back to her eyes. “Mister Banjo. In Mrs. Millett’s class. He’s our pet hamster. I was going to bring him home tomorrow and keep him a week, like the other kids. This week it’s my turn…and I won’t be there tomorrow!”

  She starts sobbing again, and Tom brings his hand up higher, to Denise’s head and soft blond hair. He strokes her hair and she sniffs and rubs a hand across her runny nose. She’s ten and normally wouldn’t be hugging a stuffed Tigger like this, but nothing here is normal. Still, despite the anger and fear and anguish, there’s pride in his little girl. She’s not your typical ten-year-old, especially since she has parents who sometimes depart for weeks or months, spending quality time on Skype or FaceTime.

  He says, “I’m sure Mrs. Millett will understand. Mom…Mom will probably tell her when she can. And then we can fix the schedule so you can get Mister Banjo later.”

  Denise nods and Tom wonders at what point his little girl will no longer be convinced that her dad can solve any problem in the world.

  “Daddy?” she finally asks.

  “Yes, love?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “Are you scared?”

  “I’m…okay. I’m concerned. This will be figured out. I’m sure.”

  He strokes her fine hair, a part of him still wondering how he—with brown hair, and Amy, with black hair—managed to come up with this little blond princess. Not an angel, good Lord, no, not with her temper and her insane curiosity and daring—like the time she saw a Bugs Bunny cartoon and climbed up on the garage roof, black umbrella in hand, convinced she could come down like an eight-year-old parachutist.

  In his daughter’s profile, Tom sees the outline of Amy’s face, first time they met. It was at an afternoon college lecture series in Maine—where, full of himself and a year into his first journalism job at the Boston Globe, he pontificated on the state of the world and the military—and at a following reception, she came up to him in her Army uniform, a sergeant.

  “Nice lecture,” she said. “Too bad fifty percent of it was bullshit.”

  Stunned but instantly attracted to her smile and bright eyes, he said, “Which fifty percent?”

  “Take me out to dinner, and I’ll tell you,” she said.

  And he did just that, and for years afterward.

  Denise stares up at him, still looking like a much younger version of her mother.

  “Why did they take us, Daddy?”

  “Because…they want something. And we’re going to be traded, like when you trade those Magic trading cards.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Denise rolls over and now he’s stroking her forehead. “Who are they, Dad? I mean…they’re so scary. And it hurt. It really hurt when they zapped me.”

  “I don’t know who they are, either. I’m sorry.”

  He takes his hand away from her smooth forehead, and she scrunches her face, like she’s trying not to cry.

  “Dad?” she asks.

  “Yes, hon?”

  “Will Mom and her friends rescue us?”

  Tom says, “I’m sure.”

  “The Army. I bet those bad guys kidnapped us because of Mom and her job.”

  “Maybe,” Tom says. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t rescue ourselves.”

  “Huh?”

  He rubs the side of her face. “We’re smart. We’re tough. Maybe we can figure out a way of escaping. What do you think?”

  She nods, barely smiling. “That sounds good. I’ll start thinking, okay? And when we get out, maybe you can call Mrs. Millett. About Mister Banjo.”

  He now rubs her belly. “Sure. That sounds great.”

  Now she’s smiling and he turns away, because he’s afraid he’s going to choke up in front of his daughter, who is relying on Daddy to save her. And who believes—and makes a good case—that this kidnapping is due to Amy’s work in the Army.

  But Tom knows better, and the guilt is threatening to co
nsume him.

  For he has secrets, secrets he’s been keeping from Amy.

  And he’s terrified they will end up killing him and Denise.

  CHAPTER 9

  IN THE kidnap note that I’ve left behind at the house, I was warned not to contact any military or law enforcement personnel.

  But they didn’t say anything about public libraries.

  I’m at a computer terminal in the corner of the Kingstowne Library, which on the outside looks like an outlet mall—no doubt because it was built in the Landsdowne Centre shopping complex—and on the inside has lots of bright colors and white ceilings and open shelves. I grew up in a small town in Maine, and our library was one of those places donated by Andrew Carnegie, a dark, Victorian-style building with lots of brick and turrets. Sometimes, when the librarian dozed, I’d play hide-and-go-seek with my gal pals.

  Back then, there were no computers, but this library has a nice little section for public use, and I’m hard at work, believe it or not. A few years ago the president and the secretary of defense made a big deal of transferring millions of dollars from our DoD budget to help upgrade computer systems in libraries across the country. Yay, everyone said. But there might have been a few nays if folks realized that in all this upgrading a back door was installed in the software for the use of nosy intelligence officers like myself who were stuck somewhere in flyover country or on the run.

  Call it defense in depth, or increasing the stability of vital DoD intelligence services, or another few bricks in the wall-to-wall surveillance of everything we do in the States, but all I know is that it works, and I need it.

  I go to an obscure federal government website about protecting rare flowers and click on a tiny gray box in the lower right-hand corner, which brings up a log-in box. I gain access by using my name, Army service number, and password.

  There’s a host of options available to me but first on my list is getting a readout of all surveillance cameras in and around Kingstowne, including those at service stations (like our friendly Sunoco from down the way), ATMs, drugstores, malls, banks, private homes, private businesses, and anywhere else with a view of the busy streets of Fairfax County. That program is called TANGO TRAPPER.

  Once I “caught” the carpet-cleaning van going down our street, I saved the blurry photo, then repeated the process when it exited. And then I caught it one more time, just as it was heading onto exit 169A north on I-95.

  Three catches.

  Enough.

  I go to another program, feed in the three blurry photos. Wait.

  Wait some more.

  Deep in some heavily guarded and secure server farm out there somewhere, things are hard at work.

  Do I know exactly what is going on?

  Nope.

  But I’m not worried.

  I take a moment and look around the pretty and safe library. A number of kids sitting at the tables, or gliding past the crowded shelves. Seeing a blond girl working at a round table stabs at me so hard that I have to turn around and look elsewhere.

  Once upon a time, places like these that contained books and knowledge were stored in heavily fortified monasteries in Europe, to protect them from the barbarians.

  Now the barbarians are no longer at the gates. Thanks to the wonders of this century, the barbarians could reach across half the globe and give you a deadly tap on the shoulder with a digital finger. Viruses, malware, phishing…

  I go back to the screen, using the program called BORAX.

  There’s my target van, sharpened up, clean, and looking fine.

  ABLE CAREPT CLEANERS, ALEXANDRIA.

  With a local phone number painted below.

  The van looks legit.

  Stolen?

  Probably.

  I’ll look into that later.

  With the sharpened photo of the van in my digital grasp, I send it along to another complicated tracking program that uses algorithms, predictive software, traffic analysis programs, and other cool stuff to watch vehicle traffic on the nation’s roads, from highways to dirt paths, as long as there is a surveillance camera in the area. This one is called CYCLOPS. I imagine some bored bureaucrat somewhere in Crystal City, whose job it is, all day long, to assign code names to various programs.

  Do I know the intricacies of the CYCLOPS program?

  No.

  Just like the sweet kids wandering around out in the safe confines of this library don’t know how their handheld devices work.

  Just a tool.

  That’s all.

  I go back to the screen.

  The spinning little doohickey, spinning away.

  Look away once more.

  Ah, damn it!

  Out in the general area of the library is Sue Judson, an assistant librarian who’s taken a shine to Denise, helping her find books about whatever obsession my daughter is exploring that month: astronomy, genealogy, the history of Victorian fashion…my smart, tough, and sweet little girl.

  Now Sue is looking this way, and I turn, hoping I’m not spotted.

  She’s lovely, about my age, desperately trying to have a child with her handsome husband, Luke, an E-6 in the Army and stationed in my building, and any other day, I’d love to talk to her.

  But not now.

  Not today.

  I go back to the screen.

  The doohickey is still spinning, spinning…stops.

  A map of Fairfax County pops up, every street, avenue, and highway lit up in pink. Little symbols of steering wheels are blinking at me.

  I click one.

  There’s the van, heading north on I-95.

  I click on the next one.

  Two miles farther north on I-95.

  And with this magic hunting system, I track the van as it goes up the highway…then to an exit…and then to a state road, and then another state road. The van moves along in a specific direction, no doubt about it, and I try very, very hard not to think of Tom and Denise, wrapped up and terrified, bouncing in the back of that stolen van, which has left Fairfax County and is going into Fauquier County.

  Then there’s no more blinking steering wheels.

  Damn!

  The van containing my life and loves is gone.

  CHAPTER 10

  I TAKE a deep breath, trying not to panic, trying not to lose faith.

  I check the last viewing of the van, passing by a private home that has a camera overlooking its driveway gate. Then…

  It’s gone.

  Somewhere in this area, the van has disappeared. But where?

  “Hey, Lucianne, how goes it?”

  Sue Judson is coming this way, having just greeted someone named Lucianne. I scrunch up my shoulders, desperately trying to avoid Sue’s notice.

  I examine the map again.

  A rural area near the small town of Atoka.

  I don’t know anything about it.

  I do a bit more research.

  Not much to know.

  There are single-family homes, a lot of farms, and—

  A private airport.

  Morgan Airport.

  More digging and dumping through the miracle of the Internet.

  It belongs to a medical device company with its main offices in Alexandria. It has a five-thousand-foot paved runway. Nice. No manned control tower, no real facilities except for those who have a reason to land or take off there.

  And no Internet-linked surveillance cameras at the two small buildings.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  CYCLOPS is now down for the count.

  What now?

  What other resources are out there for an Army intelligence officer on the run?

  If there was a security camera overhead right now, it would see me tapping away furiously at the keyboard, like the cliché scenes from movies and TV shows about dedicated hackers who can solve a knotty plot problem in five minutes by slapping a keyboard around and getting someone’s third-grade report card.

  The thing about clichés, of course, is that they’r
e always based on something real.

  Tapping away, I find something called GILLNET, which lists all sorts of external visual and audio devices away from highways or roads that can be accessed by a curious Uncle Sam and his minions, and after I plug in the GPS coordinates for Morgan Airport, I get a—

  A hit.

  I get a hit.

  And then I get a hand on my shoulder.

  “Amy, what a surprise!”

  CHAPTER 11

  PELAYO ABBOUD is standing outside the thick metal door when his trusted lieutenant, Casper Khourery, arrives holding an ice-cold sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, a white straw sticking out of the top. Pelayo nods in gratitude and gestures to the door, and Casper—a bulky man in his early thirties with perfect white teeth, light-brown skin, close-cropped curly black hair, and a carefully trimmed mustache—unlocks the door, stepping back. Casper is wearing a fine gray suit, a Savile Row knockoff, with a crisp white shirt, blue necktie, and red kerchief sticking out of the jacket pocket, which Pelayo thinks is a bit too much, but he’s a gracious boss and will allow Casper that one fashion statement.

  The door swings open and Pelayo walks in. The young girl is hunched up against the wall on her bed, coloring something in a book, and her father is drying his hands at the corner sink. Pelayo is pleased that the girl is using the coloring book, which he earlier supplied. Something to keep the little brat occupied so her father can focus on the trouble they are in. The father turns, and Pelayo sees the man is struggling to keep his emotions under guard, but Pelayo is no fool. The man before him wants to kill him and would try in this very instant, save that the little girl is here and Casper is standing in the doorway.

  Pelayo nods to the other bed. “May I sit?”

  “Do I have a choice?” comes the reply.

  “No,” Pelayo says, sitting down on the edge. “Still, I always try to keep as much courtesy in the air as I can.” He takes a sip of the cold Coke, relishes the sharp, sugary bite. He holds the bottle up and says, “My apologies. Would you and Denise like one?”

  “No,” the man says.

  “You didn’t ask her.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  Pelayo shrugs. “Your loss. This bottle comes from Coca-Cola FEMSA, which produces it in Mexico. There, they use the traditional cane sugar, unlike the corn fructose sugar used in the States. The experts say there is no difference in taste, but the experts, once again, are wrong.”