The Doll 03（文稿）

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 3
Down the hall and through the glass walls, Jahan shifted away from the monitors, watching their approach, swiveling the chair back and forth until Bradford entered the war room.
Before Bradford spoke, Jahan said, “Confirmed the VIN numbers to the ambulance.
“Found the service depot and am working on tying in to Dallas Fire-Rescue records and GPS systems so we can figure out where it came from and where it’s been.”
He paused. “News on Logan?”
Bradford shook his head. “He’s missing, too.”
Walker handed Jahan the disk. “Don’t know if it’s current, but we pulled a surveillance backup.”
Jahan stared at it for a moment, then turned to the computer and inserted the disk into a DVD tray.
Bradford and Walker leaned in closer. At their crowding, Jahan put his palms against the desk and rolled the chair backward. “Please,” he said.
They both straightened, then took a step back. Jahan waved them on farther. “Go do what you do and let me do what I do.”
When neither of them budged, he slid lower in the chair, stretched his legs, and tilted his head upward. “I’ve got all day.”
Walker glanced at Bradford, and when he offered no reassurance, she took another step in retreat, headed for the hall, and paused in the door frame just long enough to lean back in.
Said, “You’d better call me if there’s news, Jack— you leave me out of this and I swear I’ll find a way to make the rest of your life fucking miserable.”
The click of the wall segment followed a half-minute later.
Jahan muttered under his breath, his right hand making a talking motion, “As if she doesn’t trust me!”
When, after a long silence, Bradford didn’t move, Jahan glared up at him. “I need to watch,” Bradford said.
“No, you don’t. I know you think it’ll help you feel better, keeping busy, being up-to-the-second on what’s going on, and all that.
“But standing there breathing in my ear while I pull this apart is only going to give you anxiety— is going to give me anxiety.
“There are new notes on the board and you have a business to run.” Jahan motioned across the room toward the whiteboards. “Go that way.”
Bradford sighed, shifted away from the computer and everything he hoped, and fought against hoping, to find.
Hope. The activity of the impotent.
His was a world of action, of relying on his own wits and ability to create the luck that kept him alive, and yet here in a moment of weakness he was a mendicant hoping for alms.
He turned away, a concession to a friendship with Jahan that went back far enough that privately they still called each other names earned during rougher and cruder times.
Jahan’s career path had taken him from army intelligence into Bradford’s mercenary fold.
At thirty-seven, he was a second-generation American, semi-attached to an extended family in Mumbai, and having spent the predominance of the last eight years working private security in the Middle East, he could now, at least on the surface, as easily pass for Pakistani, Saudi, Persian, or Syrian as he could Indian—
sometimes Mexican or Colombian, depending on a person’s prejudice, and there always seemed to be plenty of prejudice to go around.
Jahan had a snarky way of bringing bigotry to the fore, and as it wasn’t easy to argue with a smartass who had a penchant for mockery and an IQ of 152, his words often provoked blows.
Dodging, mocking, he would laugh and taunt, claiming that jacking with intolerance was the best free entertainment around.
It didn’t take long for the Capstone term of endearment to follow.
BRADFORD FACED THE whiteboards and the diagram he’d put up this morning when the image of Munroe toppling off the motorcycle was still fresh and raw and hadn’t felt like two weeks of decay smothering his airway.
He rubbed out his previous words and replaced them simply with Michael.
Then, as if on autopilot, filled in the blanks with what little he knew:
They, whoever “they” were, knew Michael was in the country, knew where to find her, knew she was a woman, knew who Logan was to her, and knew how to find him and that his place was wired.
In the heaviness of the unanswerable, Bradford’s eyes wandered along the boards to Jahan’s latest updates on the team in Peshawar.
The satellite phone bill on that job alone was going to bankrupt him.
Seven of his core team were currently out on assignment— the two in Pakistan, plus four in Afghanistan and one in Sri Lanka.
With the exception of himself, who as boss and owner got to cherry-pick for his own schedule, the overseas assignments were rotated with homebase operations and factored by time and expertise.
Home was nice, but the big money was in the hazard pay.
It took a certain mentality to sign on for something that meant more time living rough in shithole situations than with hot water and clean sheets.
The job was difficult on relationships, if you were lucky enough to have them, and it seemed at times that a good portion of running the business involved weeding out the lunatics.
Dozens of others worked under Capstone’s umbrella, foot soldiers who came and went, but like partners in a law firm, these nine— ten if you counted Munroe— were vested:
they were Bradford’s people, tried and proven, a breed apart from polite, or even impolite, society.
Their motives for staying with the company varied, but one thing was consistent: They were each very good at what they did because the incompetent didn’t live long.
VIABLE FOOTAGE WAS sparse, but not for the reasons Bradford had expected.
Though the intruders had grabbed the original disk, they’d still taken precautions against being recognized.
They were a pack of three, with a leader who had let himself in with a key, followed by two accomplices with baseball bats, their faces shielded from the camera by caps and lowered heads.
The fight, which had taken place in the kitchen, was off camera but had lasted a painful four minutes.
Three against one. For four minutes. When they’d hauled Logan out, his right leg appeared to be broken.
He was cut and bleeding, but so were two of his assailants, and he still fought, still took a beating, all the way out the front door.
The final scene was cued at 10:13 A.M., minutes after Munroe had arrived at Capstone, and for a long while the war room was cocooned in stunned silence.
Almost simultaneously, Bradford let out a stream of expletives and Walker went off in Brazilian Portuguese.
Jahan remained quiet, his fingers tap-tapping against the desk. Finally he said, “Did they take out Michael to get to Logan, or take out Logan to get to Michael?”
The question was more or less the same line of inquisition Walker had raised in the car and Bradford didn’t want to run through it all over again.
“Put out a run for information,” he said. “See if Logan owes anyone money or if there are any jealous lovers in recent history.
“My bet is he’s clean. He’s got too much to lose, is too focused on living life and reconnecting with his daughter.”
Jahan said, “But—”
Bradford cut him off. Said, “Michael is the target, Logan is the collateral.”
“Collateral for what?”
Bradford closed his eyes. Pressed the base of his palm to his forehead. Another go through the same information.
“Collateral to save their own lives. Protection. They just grabbed Michael,” he said. “Michael.” He paused for emphasis.
“Assuming she’s tranquilized now, what happens when she wakes up? Logan is the cage, the shock collar, the shackles…”
He stopped. This was pointless. A waste of time. In his peripheral vision, he saw Walker shush Jahan.
She’d tell him later. They would hash out reservations and alternate theories on their own.
At the moment the motive didn’t matter half as much as moving quickly with what little they knew.
Bradford paused, waiting for argument, for contradiction, and got nothing.
Said, “Besides those of us here in this room, those on our team, how many people know the role Logan plays in her life?”
Walker shook her head. Jahan turned palms-up.
“There can’t be many,” Bradford said, “and that does us some pretty big favors in narrowing the playing field.”
Jahan stood and strode to the whiteboard. Added notations to Bradford’s scrawl. He turned to the others. “Where do we go with this?”
Bradford said, “Find Michael, find Logan,” and turned back to the screen, where the image of the intruders stood frozen in time, two heads down, the leader’s tilted up just enough that the side of his face showed to the camera.
There was a look of youth in his posture, an arrogance that hadn’t yet dimmed through time and experience.
“That son of a bitch knows it’s there,” Bradford said. “And he’s smirking.”
Walker came to stand beside him, then drew closer and also focused on the image.
Jahan said, “Perhaps we’re giving them too much credit for sophistication. Maybe they’re bumbling idiots, figuring it out as they go along.”
Bradford and Walker stared at him.
“Or maybe not,” he said. “But while I have your attention, and without intending to sound callous or change the subject, “with Michael out of the picture and our available resources put toward finding her, what do you want me to do with the Tisdale assignment?”
Bradford paused and blinked, a long, slow open-and-shut, then turned to look at his office, where, although he couldn’t see it, the Tisdale folder still sat on his desk and the signature page Munroe had signed this morning waited to be faxed.
Tisdale. The reason she’d come into the office today.
Tisdale wasn’t a security gig or one of the peace offerings Bradford handed Munroe to entice her to hang around longer.
This was different, a request for her services, though it hadn’t named her specifically, and it hadn’t arrived through normal Capstone channels.
The plea had come to Bradford personally from two frantic, desperate parents in California, in the hope that he might know where and how to locate Munroe.
They might not have known her by name, but anyone who was anyone within the upper social strata knew the story of Emily Burbank, missing for four years in Africa and presumed dead, and how Munroe had found her.
Bradford was still connected to the board of trustees that had bankrolled the search.
Henry and Judith Tisdale, one a Silicon Valley giant, the other a United States senator, with their combined power and influence, hadn’t needed much time at all to track him down.
Neeva Eckridge. Missing person. Could Munroe find her?
Bradford had made no promises, given no indication that he even knew how to locate Munroe, told them he’d see what he could do.
And now Munroe was missing, too. If the Eckridge kidnapping had been a ruse to pull her in, it was a goddamn masterpiece of ruses, because the whole world was looking for Eckridge and nobody could find her.
Two weeks ago, the girl had been an up-and-coming B-list Hollywood starlet and now hers was the most recognizable face in the country.
Amid a busy schedule and a flurry of appointments, she’d vanished in the only one-hour window that she would have been unaccounted for.
No signs of foul play, no eyewitnesses, no details: It was as if she’d simply vanished.
What started out as sensational gossip soon turned into a media feeding frenzy, because until Neeva Eckridge had gone missing, nobody, not her agent, not her boyfriend, not her Hollywood friends, had had any idea that the Tisdales were her parents.
Speculation buzzed as much over Neeva’s true and fabricated pasts as it did in regards to what could have happened to her, and regardless of the angle— sensational, fearmongering, alien abduction, or otherwise— Neeva’s picture, and her parents’, were everywhere.
Bradford continued to stare at his office, toward the documents.
Munroe had wanted the assignment, had been eager for it, but if she was the Tisdales’ best hope for finding their daughter, then at the rate things were going today, it was a lost cause.
Walker drew near and stood beside him, the top of her head reaching his shoulder.
When he’d shifted straighter, taller, and had obviously returned to the present, she spoke. “Do you think they’re connected?”
“I can’t see how,” he replied. “But the timing is freakishly coincidental.”
“We have Michael taken down,” she said, “Logan being held as a hostage, and all of this possibly connected to Neeva Eckridge, who also disappeared with no witnesses. What thread draws them together?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “Because if I had that piece of information, I’d find the bastard who’s behind this that much faster.”
He turned to her and she looked up to meet his gaze. “I will find him,” he said. “And I will destroy him.”