Debris Line (Gibson Vaughn) Page 9

  Luisa turned her dark eyes back to the boy in the chair.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time they pulled up at the paint store, Hendricks was having second thoughts about the receipt.

  Now, positivity was not Hendricks’s natural state. Gibson had once called him a pessimist, to which Hendricks had retorted, I’m not a pessimist. I’m black. Whatever the reason, Hendricks wasn’t often wrong. They didn’t see eye to eye on much, but Gibson had learned to listen up whenever Hendricks got a bad feeling. Anibal hadn’t learned that lesson and dismissed Hendricks’s concerns.

  “What’s up?” Gibson asked.

  “You know how in movies where the police scour every square inch of a crime scene and find nothing. Then later, the hero breaks in and finds a clue that all the cops overlooked?”

  “Doesn’t happen in real life?”

  Hendricks shook his head sourly.

  “Well, Baltasar’s crew aren’t exactly trained detectives.”

  “No, that’s not even what I’m talking about. Criminals don’t make one mistake, see. Either they make none, or they make all of them. There’s either a million fucking fingerprints or the scene is pristine. There’s no middle ground. Either criminals know what they’re doing, or they don’t. Take these hijackers. Would you say they have their act together?”

  “I would.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty slick. Thought of everything, so it seems. Planning was meticulous. Knew when. Knew where. Tiptoed past security. Cameras, motion detectors, explosives. In and out like ghosts.”

  “Except for the receipt.”

  “Three gallons of bright-yellow paint. Kind of a memorable purchase, wouldn’t you say? So why wait until two days before the job to buy it? Increase the chance that someone remembers. And why leave the cans lying around, with or without a legible receipt conveniently on the bottom?”

  “So, what are you thinking?”

  “Man, this is nothing but cheese. And we’re the damn mice.”

  “You think it’s a trap?”

  “Don’t know, but one thing it ain’t is a lead.”

  “So why are we here?”

  “Well, this is Anibal’s show now. Personally, I’m kind of curious to see what happens. It’ll tell us more than any receipt will, that I guarantee.”

  “Think I’ll stay in the car,” Gibson said.

  “Not the worst idea you ever had.”

  Hendricks followed Anibal inside the paint store. Gibson watched through the store’s floor-to-ceiling windows, which glinted in the sun. Tomas opened the garbage bag of empty paint cans and set them in a row on the counter. Anibal went looking for the manager while Hendricks wandered through the back of the place as if shopping for paint. Didn’t look like much of a trap.

  The store sat on a solitary stretch of road. To the east stood a broken, weathered building. Only the layers of graffiti, like the rings of a tree, gave any hint as to how long it had been abandoned. Other than that, Gibson didn’t see much in either direction apart from the café next door. Gibson’s stomach growled. It was like Portugal had passed a law requiring X number of cafés per capita. In busier neighborhoods, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting three or four. And even on a desolate stretch of road like this one, there’d still be one bright, hopeful café. The mystery Gibson hadn’t solved was how they all stayed in business when he almost never saw any customers.

  This one was no exception. Empty tables stood guard outside on its narrow patio. Gibson remembered the ten-euro note still tucked into his sock. After his morning run and workout, he’d meant to have breakfast in Old Town but never got the chance. He fished out the crumpled bill and smoothed it on his thigh. It had blood on one corner, but ten euros was ten euros.

  The owner of the café, a gray-haired man with a jet-black mustache, greeted him in Portuguese. Gibson asked if he spoke English, but the man shook his head. As you got away from the resort towns, English fell off quickly. Gibson fumbled his way through ordering a sandwich and a bottle of water. It was the height of the day, and the patio offered no respite from the sun, so Gibson sat at a table inside and sipped his water. The owner disappeared into the back.

  Across the courtyard, Gibson could see Anibal talking to the store manager. Didn’t look like the receipt had produced the big break that he had hoped it would. Judging by body language, that upset Anibal a lot more than it did Hendricks, who leaned against a counter and listened disinterestedly.

  Gibson finished his water but was still thirsty. The shopkeeper was busy in the back, so Gibson left money on the counter and took another bottle. He hadn’t gotten used to European servings sizes—a large was smaller than an American small. He’d have killed for a Big Gulp right about now. A shadow passed behind him. Gibson turned to see a white panel van pull up to the café, blocking out the sun.

  The side door rolled open. A man crouched inside. He held a gun in one hand and, even when he jumped lightly down from the van, he never stopped pointing it at Gibson. Outside, from the direction of the paint store, gunfire and the sound of shattering glass erupted. Hendricks had been right again. Gibson hoped that whatever the ex-cop learned was worth it.

  “Put this on,” the armed man said and tossed a black cloth to Gibson. He had a Portuguese accent but spoke the English of someone who had lived out of the country.

  Gibson caught it, saw it was a hood, and dropped it like it was radioactive. The light pixelated before his eyes. His skin went cold, and he was hyperventilating. The last time someone had put a hood on him, he’d wound up in a windowless cell for eighteen months. He’d lost his mind and everything he cared about. This son of a bitch was living in a fantasy world if he thought Gibson would willingly subject himself to that again.

  “No. Fuck no.”

  “Pick it up. Put it on. I will shoot you.”

  “So shoot me,” Gibson said and meant it. “I’m not putting that on.”

  The man gave him an exasperated look, as if Gibson were screwing up a basic social convention. Don’t talk in movie theaters, hold the door, wash your hands after using the bathroom, and when the guy with the gun tells you to put on a hood . . . put it on. Gibson estimated the distance between himself and the gunman. He wouldn’t get two steps, but he preferred a bullet to another hood. However, before he could put his death-by-kidnapper scheme into action, someone clipped him across the back of the head and sent him sprawling to the ground.

  A knee dug into his spine. Gibson struggled anyway, but when the hood went over his head, the strangest thing happened. He felt himself go limp as if he’d been drugged. Almost peaceful. Was this what happened to a horse wearing blinders? He allowed himself to be handcuffed and bundled into the van. A crazy thought entered his mind—he was going home. He felt relief, which scared him more than the gun. The last six months had given him confidence in his reconstructed sanity. He no longer talked to the dead, and more importantly, the dead no longer talked back. But it was discouraging how quickly he’d gone docile under the hood—like he had some switch in his head waiting to be flipped.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The beating that Marco Zava put on João Luna verged on the balletic. Most big men relied on brute strength, but the bodyguard worked João over like a butcher carving filets. Zava didn’t touch the boy’s face but focused instead on the torso. Jenn could tell he was pulling his punches, but every blow landed with precision and purpose. The purpose being to make him hurt but not break him. João twisted and turned, trying to squirm away out of reach, but the guards held him fast to the chair.

  Luisa read a list of names from a small black notebook, intoning them with ecclesiastic contempt. The names meant nothing to Jenn, but they meant something to the boy in the chair. As the blows continue to fall, he wept and begged Luisa not to harm his family. Unmoved, she kept up the recitation until her voice, the thud of the blows, and the boy’s cries blended together in a sinuous music. All they needed was an organ, Jenn thought, and this would be her grandmot
her’s kind of religion. Hallelujah, amen.

  She blanked her mind so that, although she could see and hear, she wasn’t watching or listening. A little trick she’d learned as a little girl at the hands of her grandmother, then perfected on forward operating bases in Afghanistan. João Luna stopped being a real person to her. She pushed the little hotel room into a distant corner until it was as abstract as a history book. A tragedy but nothing to do with her. Jenn felt bad for the boy in the chair, but he had made the mistake of working for criminals. He would need to find his own way out. Same as the rest of them.

  It wasn’t abstract to George.

  He’d spent two years being tortured and beaten by Titus Eskridge’s people. A scapegoat because Eskridge couldn’t punish Jenn, who had put a bullet in Eskridge’s son at the lake house in Pennsylvania. Seeing it happen to another person clearly brought it all back to George. He began to shake, breath coming in tight hitches. Jenn saw it too late. Tried and failed to hold him back, but he stumbled toward the boy in the chair and bellowed for them to stop.

  Zava froze midpunch, fist floating in the air as if someone had pressed “Pause.” All eyes turned to George. The two guards drew their weapons and drove him back. One pressed the muzzle of his gun against George’s temple, twisting his head sideways, pinning it to the wall. The other covered Jenn and looked to Luisa for instructions. Jenn raised her hands and looked imploringly at Luisa. Neutral was no longer an option.

  “Please,” Jenn said. “Don’t.”

  Luisa showed no signs of empathy. “What’s the matter with him? I don’t have time for this.”

  “He’s innocent,” George spat.

  “You have the wrong man,” Jenn said. “He had nothing to do with the hijacking. Please.”

  Luisa looked at the boy cowering in the chair, then at the satchel of euros, the gun, the plane ticket. The overwhelming case against him. Wheels turning. Jenn could see she had doubts of her own. Doubts that she’d silenced because putting a face to the faceless hijackers had finally given her an object for her anger. Jenn understood exactly how seductive that felt. And how hard it was to talk someone out of it once their mind was made up.

  “Tell me why,” Luisa said but gave no order for her men to holster their weapons.

  “How did you find him?” Jenn asked. “He checked in under an alias.”

  Luisa narrowed her eyes. “He turned on his phone. We tracked his GPS.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Ninety minutes.”

  “Seems pretty stupid.”

  “Criminals are stupid. Trust me on that, I have a lifetime of experience on the subject.”

  “Perhaps, but this one seems pretty well prepared otherwise. He knew enough to switch his phone off. Check in under an alias. Pay cash. So why turn it back on and fall asleep? Why not get a burner phone? He has everything else.”

  “Criminals are stupid,” Luisa repeated with a little less enthusiasm than before, so she tried another tack. “He hadn’t slept. The stress of running for his life. He is tired. He makes a call and then a mistake. He falls asleep without switching it back off.”

  It was a reasonable interpretation. Entirely within the realm of possibility, but Jenn still didn’t buy it. An idea occurred to her. It was risky but might push Luisa in the right direction. Only if she was right, though. Otherwise, João Luna really was on his own.

  “Who did he call?” Jenn asked, taking a tentative step forward.

  “What?”

  Jenn said, “Check his ingoing and outgoing calls. Check his texts. I’ll bet you that satchel of money there that he didn’t talk to anyone in the last ninety minutes.”

  Luisa gestured for the phone, and Zava brought it to her. She asked for the passcode. João gave it to her without hesitation. They all watched Luisa scroll through the phone’s history. Jenn could tell from her expression that the call wasn’t there.

  “He could have deleted it,” Luisa said without conviction.

  “So he was smart enough to delete the call from his history, but too stupid to turn the phone back off? Come on, Luisa. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Luisa stared at her for a long moment. “What the hell is happening here?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the end, Gibson didn’t know if they’d driven for ten minutes or sixty. Whether they’d traveled in circles or in a straight line. An old Robert Redford movie about a team of hackers, a favorite of his father’s, had given him an idea. In one scene, Redford had been kidnapped by goons, thrown in the trunk of a car, and driven to the boss’s hideout. After his release, Redford’s team reconstructed where he’d been held based on what sounds he’d heard from the trunk. It was a cool concept, but it didn’t take Gibson long to realize it was impossible. Not when the world didn’t offer geographically distinct sounds every few miles to serve as audio landmarks. Lying on the floor of the van, Gibson only felt the vibrations from the road and the monotonous rumble of passing vehicles. Not much to go on if he ever managed to get free.

  So, what did he know for sure? Not a great deal. Was Hendricks dead? Gibson hoped not, but from the sound of it, his abductors had gone full automatic on the paint store. They’d taken Gibson alive, though. He took that as a good sign. Unless his abductors wanted to take their time killing him. It would explain why the gunman hadn’t bothered with a mask. A disheartening thought. Gibson didn’t want to die in running shorts.

  When the van finally lurched to a halt, the men dragged Gibson out unceremoniously. Strong hands stood him upright and led him up a flight of steps. Cool air buffeted him as they passed through a doorway. The men deposited him onto a hard-backed chair, removed the handcuffs, and yanked off the hood like he was the main course at a great feast.

  Gibson rubbed his wrists and examined his new accommodations. He sat in the center of a windowless room painted the color of burned pancakes. The only furniture aside from his chair was a rectangular folding table against the far wall. On the table, a laptop in a docking station connected three oversized monitors. Speakers played an old Nine Inch Nails track. The volume gradually rose, and the lyrics—in oversized type—scrolled down the center monitor.

  Gibson didn’t need the prompt. He knew every note and word. Back in high school, NIN had been on heavy rotation while he was learning his way around computers. This particular track had been a personal anthem for his hack of Senator Benjamin Lombard. One of the damning articles written about him after his arrest had pointed to his taste in music as emblematic of the degenerate hacker culture that he supposedly represented. If your child listens to Korn, Rage Against the Machine, Linkin Park, or NIN, then he might be an antisocial hacker too. The classic idiocy that certain music led to a life of crime. The article had specifically referenced NIN’s “Head Like a Hole,” so hearing the track now felt pointed. A message being delivered: Hello, Gibson Vaughn, I know who you are.

  Gibson doubted that very much.

  The song ended and the center monitor faded to black. Someone had an overly developed sense of the dramatic. Gibson looked forward to the smoke bombs and laser show. After a moment, text appeared on the monitor.

  Why is the back of his head bleeding?

  One of Gibson’s abductors stepped forward, clearing his throat embarrassedly. “He wouldn’t put on the hood.” The man’s English was good, but the accent was Portuguese.

  Gibson touched the back of his head. His fingers came away wet. Whoever was typing could see the back of his head. He glanced around and saw cameras circling him. Someone really didn’t want to miss a thing. It reminded Gibson of the hijacking at Fresco Mar . . . And like that, he knew they were the same people who had taken him. The problem was, he couldn’t decide if that was good news or bad.

  He wouldn’t put on the hood, so you cracked his head? the monitor typed, followed by a frowny-face emoji.

  “We didn’t have time to negotiate with him,” the man explained. “Alves’s people put up more resistance than expected.”

&
nbsp; Gibson hoped Hendricks had given them hell.

  The monitor asked, Well, is he ok? Did you break him?

  “You know,” Gibson said, interrupting, “I’m sitting right here.”

  Apparently not, the monitor concluded. Good. Everyone can wait outside.

  His abductors filed out, locking the door behind them and leaving Gibson alone with the monitor.

  Gibson Vaughn, the monitor read. This is a trip.

  “Do I know you?”

  No, but I’m a huge fan. The BrnChr0m, the monitor read, using Gibson’s old hacker handle.

  “It’s not all true,” Gibson said.

  It never is. But between you and me, did you pop the vice president down in the ATL?

  Gibson set his jaw and tried to keep the anger from his face. He doubted he was successful. The inherent asymmetry of this interrogation placed him in a weak position. He or she or they could see his face and hear his voice all while safely obscured by monochromatic typeface. It was like playing poker with a machine. Still, Gibson would bet that whoever was typing on the other end was an American. He’d had that sense looking at the setup at the cannery, and the monitor’s word choices cinched it.

  The monitor continued, No need to be modest. You altered an American presidential election. Swung it from one party to another. That’s the brass ring, man. Do you not see how epic that is? The man in the White House is only there because of you. You’re a kingmaker.

  “Do I look like a damn kingmaker to you?” Gibson snapped. The last thing he was in the mood for was to listen to someone mythologize his past. Spin his life into a narrative. Turn him into something he never was and never would be.

  A significant pause followed. Have it your way. So I guess you’re wondering why you’re here.

  “You hijacked Baltasar’s shipment.”

  Another pause.

  Have to tell you, the old jaw about hit the floor when I recognized you in the cannery. You were NOT on our radar. At all. Believe me, we are going to do a complete overhaul of our procedures. I’m not going to sleep until I know how we missed that Gibson Vaughn was in Portugal working for Baltasar Alves.