The Collective (33 page)

No matter who killed Leyla, Cait would be painted as a domestic terrorist.

Or she would have been, if they had gotten away with it.

“If any of this is true, it still doesn’t explain why this Collective had cars outside my aunt’s house at two o’clock this morning, and why they tried to snatch Leyla about eight hours later. I made the eleven o’clock news last night for a skirmish I had with this football asshole, but there was no mention of Leyla during that report. That wouldn’t have sent a flag up.”

Lynch nodded thoughtfully, braking and checking his rearview mirrors as he took a corner.

“But, for some reason, it did,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but the timing is too close to be coincidental. That had to have been the trigger.”

“And my brother?” Her heart felt like a block of ice. “He’s really dead?”

Lynch frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would they go after other members of your family?”

Cait scowled, about to call bullshit, but either Lynch was telling the truth or he was a damn good actor. He didn’t just look mystified by the question, he seemed greatly troubled by it.

As succinctly as she could, she filled him in on the events leading up to the massacre at her apartment. “How can you know so much about me and Leyla and nothing about the rest of it?” she asked at last.

Lynch’s lips were a thin white line. He seemed to be struggling, trying to figure out how to answer her—or maybe if he wanted to answer her at all.

“I’m not a savior and I don’t claim to know everything,” he said at last, guarded and even a little ashamed. “I’ve spent my entire life fighting these people. There’s a group—a Resistance, I guess you could call us—whose sole purpose is to stand against the Herods. All of them, in every conflict.”

“To save the children.”

Lynch hesitated. “I’ve saved some. But they’re persistent, these people. You understand that? They have superior numbers and there are always more. At any given time, there are half a dozen or more significant conflicts going on in different regions of the world. The Collective are just the American
end of things. Five years ago, I finally realized that I could never protect the children one at a time, that the only solution was direct action.”

“Meaning?”

“I hunt them. I’ve been trying to infiltrate their organization, mostly unsuccessfully, but I’ve drained a certain amount of intelligence and have been eliminating those I can find, one by one. I’ve been able to track some of the jihadists as well. But in the past few months, both sides have gotten ambitious, like they are in a race to see how many of these kids they can track and kill. Maybe because tensions seem to be easing somewhat and they’re afraid the war is starting to die down.”

Cait stared at him, processing. “You’re an assassin.”

Anger sparked in his eyes. “Yeah? What are you? You left all those corpses—”

“I’m a mother, defending my child.”

“And what about all the
other
children? What about the soldiers dying every day? When there are wolves in the woods, it isn’t enough to guard the sheep. You can’t watch them all, every minute. You hunt the wolves.”

Cait studied the lines in his face, the crinkles at the corner of his eye. All her life she had considered herself a good judge of character, especially of men, but Lynch confused her.

“I caught up to one of them today,” Lynch said, glancing at her. “You asked how I knew about you and Leyla? When the baby was stolen in Bangor, an Iraqi jihadist named Gharib al-Din—one of their baby-killers—showed up on the security camera. I tracked him down at the Bangor airport, on a plane bound for Boston, and persuaded him to tell me where he was going and why.”

“You tortured him.”

Lynch kept his eyes on the road. “He told me about you and Leyla. He didn’t mention anything about your brother. The Collective probably took out Sean to avoid trouble once they had Leyla.”

Cait squeezed her eyes tightly shut and tried to breathe. She had already begun to assume the same thing, but hearing
it out loud made her feel sick. Again she thought of Miranda and a fresh wave of grief spread through her.

“You took a plane from Bangor. Which means you stole this car.”

“From long-term parking at Logan Airport. Unless I’m very unlucky and the owner returns from his trip today, the car’s safe for now.”

“And Gharib al-Din? Where is he?”

“I sent him to Allah.”

Cait shuddered. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, then opened her eyes and turned to Lynch.

“So what’s your plan?”

“We’re fugitives,” Lynch said. “All three of us. They could come after us quietly or go public, claim we’re wanted for some crime. After the shootout on your lawn, I’d guess the latter. Within an hour, your picture’s going to be everywhere, wanted for questioning in all those deaths. The Resistance has a safe house in New York. Four hours and we’ll be there. If we can make it without you being spotted, we’ll be okay for a while.”

“For a while?”

“I didn’t know you existed until a couple of hours ago,” Lynch said. “Give me a chance to think.”

Again Cait closed her eyes. Her body had started to come down off of its adrenaline high and at last she felt like she could focus. Matthew Lynch had saved her life as well as Leyla’s. He might be a killer, but was he a soldier or a lunatic? She couldn’t believe in destiny—in the birth of a single child changing the fates of nations—but people had killed one another for stranger beliefs. Countries had gone to war over less.

She only wished she could talk to Sean. Without a body, without a funeral, she could still not quite believe that he was dead and gone, and she really needed him right now. He would know what to do. He would raise hell in the secret corridors of D.C. to protect Leyla. But she didn’t have Sean to rely on now. According to Hercules, all she had were his ashes.

Hercules
.

She reached into her pocket and slid out her cell phone.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lynch demanded.

“Calling someone who can help,” Cait said, and started to dial the emergency number for Herc that Sean had given her, in case she had no other way to reach him. Sean was gone now, but it was Herc she needed to talk to.

Lynch snatched the phone from her hand. Before she could protest, he ended the call. As she scrabbled at his hands, trying to get the phone back, he lowered his window.

“Stop! Give it back! Don’t even—”

He tossed the phone out the window. She could picture it shattering on the highway but they were going fast enough that she didn’t hear it hit the ground.

“Motherfucker!” she shouted, raising her gun and pointing it at his temple. “Whatever trust I might have been willing to give you just went out the window with that phone!”

Leyla began to whimper in the backseat, crying a little but not waking up. Lynch raised the window, one hand on the wheel. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were cold.

“Your brother worked with satellites, you said. Any idea how easy it would be for them to track that phone? If you want your daughter to live, Sergeant, you’re going to have to be a lot smarter than that.”

Cait’s aim faltered. The barrel of the gun dipped and then she lowered it altogether.

“The guy I was calling might be the one person who could help us.”

“You still don’t get it,” Lynch said. “You can’t trust anyone.”

“Except you,” Cait said, practically sneering the words.

Lynch turned to stare at her with ice blue eyes, the Caddy gliding along the turnpike in the dark.

A voice startled Herc awake. He’d fallen asleep in the easy chair in the living room watching an old Clint Eastwood movie that he’d recorded on DVR. He looked around to find himself alone—his wife, Ellen, must have gone to bed—and it took him a few seconds to backtrack in his mind and figure out what had woken him.

The voice came again. “Hey, asshole! Answer the phone!”

His throat went dry and he stared over at a little corner shelf. Next to a tiny copper statue of an Indian—a replica of a famous Fredric Remington sculpture—a bright red cell phone lay charging. The Hot Line. Herc kept it charged, kept it with him, though it almost never rang. Today he had nearly forgotten about it.

“Hey, asshole! Answer the phone!” it screamed again.

Sean McCandless had recorded that message for Herc’s ringtone. Now his voice was shouting from the grave. Herc spent a half a second longer trying to figure out who the hell could be calling him—only a handful of people had the number, including Sean and Terry—then he scrambled from the chair and raced for it.

“Hello? Terry?”

The line had a hollow tone. Dead, empty air. Whoever it was had hung up. He clicked over to check the number of his last incoming call and for a second the breath froze in his lungs.
McCandless, C
. In the space between blinks, he had let himself believe that somehow it had all been a huge mistake or some kind of cover-up, that Sean had been in deep cover and the corpse had not belonged to him, that he was calling now to apologize for putting Herc through the shock and grief.

But, of course, C stood for
Caitlin
. Sean had told Herc a
thousand times that he had given Caitlin the Hot Line number, just in case he went off the radar for a while and an emergency came up. Now Herc thought of Boyce and his insistence that he be the one to deal with Cait if she tried calling back. Boyce was an idiot. Why would she call that number when they had already told her Sean had died?

“Shit,” he whispered, staring at the phone in his hand. It felt strangely warm.

If he called Cait back and Boyce found out, things could get very ugly. He would be disobeying a direct order. But his hesitation only lasted a second. Sean would have put his life on the line for Herc any day of the week. The least Herc could do in return was put his job on the line for Caitlin. He had made promises to Sean, sworn to look out for her if she ever needed help and Sean wasn’t available. Boyce would never understand such promises, but Boyce was a prick.

Herc hit the callback button and put the phone to his ear, ready to talk. Ready to help. But the call went straight through to Cait’s voice mail as if she had the phone off and he hung up without leaving a message. No reason to give Boyce any evidence; that would just be asking for trouble.

Half a minute ticked by while he stood there in the living room, his wife sleeping upstairs and Clint Eastwood dying on the television, poisoned by a crazy Civil War–era schoolgirl who thought she loved him. He tried the number again with the same result, then started to worry. Cait knew the Hot Line was for emergencies. Maybe whatever she was calling for counted, or maybe she just wasn’t satisfied with the answers she had been getting and wanted a more private conversation with him, but it didn’t matter. After his conversation with Stanovitch, he had already made up his mind to talk to her, but he had planned to do it a bit more surreptitiously, telling himself she would be in D.C. for some kind of memorial for Sean soon enough.

Apparently he’d been fooling himself with his definition of
soon enough
.

He ran it all through his mind again. According to Stanovitch, the cars watching her aunt and uncle’s house had blank plates, which required a level of political clout that
seemed almost mythical to Herc. He’d never known anyone who moved in those circles. But with Sean dead, it was obvious something major was going on, no matter what Boyce said.

Again he tried calling Cait. Again the call went straight to voice mail. Inside, he knew something awful had happened. The weight of that certainty seemed almost enough to suffocate him.

You should’ve moved on it immediately. Idiot
. The self-recriminations came hard and fast. He had been frozen by Stanovitch’s revelation, had told himself that whatever had happened had been focused on Sean. He’d been concerned for Cait, but not enough to act immediately.

Sean McCandless had been his best friend. In all the time they’d known each other, he’d only ever really asked Herc for one thing, and Herc had blown it.

The red phone felt weightless in his hand. He swore under his breath as he strode toward the small room at the back of the house that he kept as an office. Green banker’s lamp over the rolltop desk. Original poster for
The Eiger Sanction
signed by Eastwood and George Kennedy over a bookcase. Next to the computer monitor, a black address book. He grabbed it, flipped through to
M
, found the number Sean had given him more than two years ago for his sister.

He dialed.

Someone picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

Herc exhaled, thinking
Thank Christ
. “Cait? Caitlin?”

“Who’s this?”

Shit. Not Caitlin
. And as innocuously as the woman had tried to deliver the query, the tone had the air of authority, of someone used to getting an answer when she asked a question.
Cop
.

“I’m returning a call,” Herc said. “Is Cait there?”

“Not at the moment. Maybe you’d like to leave a—”

Herc killed the call. He stared at the red phone like it would be able to help him somehow, trying to figure out what the hell to do next. The woman who had answered Cait’s phone was either a cop or a Fed. Cait had called and hung up
and now he couldn’t reach her. The only thing he could think to do was wait until she tried to get in touch again.