“Melisa was incredible. There was no sense of judgment or disgust about what she was doing or where she was, she just got down to the business of bringing that baby into the world. And when it was born, something so small and perfect and new in the middle of all that filth, I felt ashamed.”
He took a deep breath as the memories came fast and painful.
“I was helping her clean the baby when the boyfriend arrived — a mean son-of-a-bitch called Floyd who kept in shape by handing out beatings to the women he ran and anyone else who got in his way. He saw the child and told us to leave. Melisa refused. I don’t know if he was going to kill it and get Annie back on the streets and earning again, or maybe he had a buyer lined up — everything has a street value, even a newborn baby.”
Shepherd stared out at the busy concourse but in his mind he was back in that basement room, filth, food wrappers and empty bottles on the floor and tacked to the wall a fading Apocalypse Now movie poster with a bright orange sun that shone no light into that dark place.
“Melisa refused to move. Floyd pulled a knife. I’d heard he’d been known to slice the face of any girl who crossed him so I reacted, grabbed a bottle from the floor and threw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head, hard enough to knock him back but not enough to stop him. Next thing I know I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms down, another bottle in my hand. And I just kept hitting him with it. I knew if I let him get up he’d kill me and probably kill Melisa too so I just kept hitting him until he stopped moving. The bottle must have broken at some point and cut his neck. I didn’t even realize it. There was so much blood. It was like someone had turned on a tap.
“I can’t even remember what happened next but somehow Melisa got us all out of there. She took us to the shelter where she worked and cleaned us all up. I was all for turning myself in but she told me not to. She said it was an accident, self-defense, and that I should wait until the police came looking.”
“Let me guess,” Franklin said, “they never did.”
“I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step program, started running computer training courses and setting up networks and Web sites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.
“God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things just grew from there. Hell of a first date. We kept it all secret because of her father. He was the doctor who ran the project. He was a strict Muslim and I don’t think he would have taken too kindly to the prospect of having an infidel ex-bum for a prospective son-in-law.
“Anyway, months passed and Melisa’s visa was about to expire, so I asked her to marry me — not because of the visa but because I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything before or since. We had it all planned, we were going to slip away and just do it. Then a few days before we planned to run away something happened.
“Looking back I should have known something was wrong. Her old man called me into his office late one afternoon, said he had a job for me. There was another homeless organization we worked with way over on the other side of town and their computer network had melted down or something and they needed to fix it urgently. It was late in the day, rush hour, but I went anyway — anything to score points with my prospective father-in-law. When I got to the place the guy there didn’t know anything about it so I turned right around and drove back again.
“By the time I made it back through all the traffic to the shelter the whole street was blocked off. There’d been some kind of incident. Someone had thrown petrol bombs into the place and the whole building had gone up. There were racist slogans painted on the walls too: terrorists, ragheads, that kind of thing — post nine-eleven hate gone crazy. I tried to find Melisa and her father, checked the hospitals and everything, but they were gone.
“At first I thought they must be scared and hiding out somewhere. But when the weeks went by, then months with no word, I thought maybe she’d had second thoughts about me, about living and working in a country that seemed to blindly hate Islam so much.
“I did what I could to find her, but the police weren’t interested. They weren’t missing persons technically and there was something suspicious about the fire. An insurance scam, they called it.”
“So you joined the FBI to see if you could find her yourself?”
“Partly. Though in truth everything I told O’Halloran was also true. I do feel I owe my country a debt for everything it’s done for me.”
He heard Franklin take a deep breath on the other end of the line. “You know sometimes people disappear because they want to. Or they disappear because they’re dead.”
“I don’t think she is.” Through the phone he could hear the white noise of tires in the background. “You asked me a while back what ‘home’ meant to me, well for me it’s not a place, it’s a person, it’s Melisa. She’s where I’m trying to get to and if she was dead I don’t think I’d feel what I’m feeling. Even if she doesn’t love me, even if she never did, I still love her and I just want to know that she’s safe. I just want to know she’s okay.”
Shepherd glanced up at the departure’s board and saw Last Call flashing by his flight number. “Got to go, Agent Franklin, I’ll call you if I find anything useful.”
“Take care, Agent Shepherd. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you happen to find Kinderman and the world really is about to get smashed into a million pieces then do me a favor — keep it to yourself. I changed my mind; I’d rather not know.”
89
Gabriel was woken by the sound of a bell clanging mournfully through the darkness. He opened his eyes and counted the strikes, ten in all, though there might have been more before. It had been evening when Dr. Kaplan had started drawing blood. It was dark now, the room lit only by the glow of the monitors he was plugged into.
He stretched out in the bed and found that his arms and legs were still bound tightly to it.
“Hello?” His voice fell away into the silence. It had to be later than ten to be this quiet. They must have taken his blood over to the main lab and left him to his rest, strapped down in his own private prison.
He listened to the sounds of the room: the faint beep of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat, the whisper of fans keeping circuits cool and the soft bang of a door that sounded both close and also very far away as the echo bounced around inside the warren of the mountain. He looked back over at the window, his one real connection to the outside world, and felt a chill. Someone was there, a monk — standing by the door leading to the bedchamber. It was too dark to see his face, but Gabriel could make out the white surgical mask covering the lower portion of it, and above that, the lenses of a pair of spectacles reflected what light there was in the room, making it seem like the man’s eyes were glowing. The heart monitor bleeped a little faster and Gabriel tried to calm himself by focusing on his breathing and doing what he could to take control of the situation. “Good evening,” he said, as if he had met someone out on a stroll. “You get stuck with the night shift?”