Carrie King
At the sound of knocking, Carrie hurried to the door. Amanda stood on the other side of it, shivering in the cold. Carrie quickly ushered her in. She was halfway in when they both turned at the sound of running steps. Lee almost skidded as he turned the corner toward their doorstep, and he came in with her.
“And just where have you been?” snarled Joe from the entrance to the kitchen.
“At work,” said Amanda, her chin coming up.
“At eleven o’clock at night? What could you possibly have been working on, that kept you too late to have dinner with your family?”
“There was an emergency.” Amanda’s voice was firm. “I called around 3:30 and left a message on the machine, telling Jamie to come over here and have dinner with you. I also said I’d pick him up as soon as I could.”
“An emergency,” said Joe, his anger still in full force. “An emergency. Something more important than your own son? I would think you’ve learned better by now.”
“Hey,” broke in Lee. “Watch it.”
“You watch it! We didn’t even know he was missing until we got the automated call from the school!”
Carrie laid a hand on Joe’s arm. “Joe, please.” Then, turning to Lee and Amanda, she continued, “We tried going over to your unit, but it was locked and dark. That’s when we called you, Amanda.”
Amanda nodded. “What are you talking about, automated call from the school?”
Joe harrumphed, but his voice was calmer. “The one reporting he was absent today.”
Now Amanda rounded on him. “Excuse me? He left with you, and you said you’d drop him off! Did you forget, or was something in your work more important?”
“Don’t start!” But Joe had dropped his gaze. “I did drop him off. On the sidewalk outside the main entrance. The ride had been…Amanda, you know what kind of a mood he was in after the session. It didn’t get any better, but when I dropped him off, he just closed the door, waved, and headed toward the entrance.” He sighed. “Before you ask, no, I didn’t actually see him go in. He’s in seventh grade! I shouldn’t need to!”
“No,” said Lee. “And you wouldn’t have needed to worry about it under normal circumstances. But you knew these weren’t, because you were in that session! Why didn’t you at least suspect something?”
Echoing Carrie’s earlier motion, Amanda laid a hand on Lee’s arm. “Lee. There was no reason. Jamie’s never acted up this badly before.”
That, at least, got everyone to shut up for a minute, and Carrie breathed a sigh of relief. “While we were waiting for you, Amanda, I made some hot chocolate. You look like you might need it.”
Amanda exhaled, her shoulders dropping. “Thank you. It’s cold outside, and I left my coat at the office.”
Lee wrapped an arm around her waist. “And there is an emergency at work. A big one, and it’s related to Phillip’s and Dotty’s case. I was out in the field, but I got over here as quickly as I could after Billy told me what happened.”
Carrie stopped and turned back to look at him. “What happened?”
Lee frowned at her. “I just told you what happened. After Billy called me, I got here as quickly as I could.”
“No,” she clarified, taking a step back toward the other three. “What happened with the case? And I thought you weren’t allowed to work on it. Isn’t that right?”
Amanda and Lee exchanged a long look, and then he took his coat off, laying it on their usual love seat, before pulling his wife down and settling next to her. “It’s all hands on deck. If you’ll bring in the hot chocolate, we’ll tell you everything.” His gaze slid over. “While we’re waiting, maybe Joe can catch us up a little more.”
Joe collapsed onto a chair. “I’ve told you all I know. Jamie apparently skipped school today. Carrie didn’t find out until he wasn’t on the bus back to her school. That was hours afterward. Goodness knows how far away he already was by then.”
By then, Carrie was in the kitchen, so any reply that either Lee or Amanda might have made was muffled. She was breathing heavily, but forced herself to calm down as she poured the chocolate. She put a splash of peppermint-flavored liqueur into one of them, marking the mug by folding the napkins into the handle. Carrie had never learned how to manage the taste of it herself, but Joe loved it; and he certainly had sounded like he needed a little extra.
As she started carrying the tray out, Amanda’s voice rose again. “…no, leaving is what you do! Have you even told him you’re going to Ivory Coast yet?”
Carrie bit her lip as she handed out chocolate. “No,” she jumped in, “we haven’t. He’s been in no shape to hear it, and —”
“— and there are some things we need to confirm before we say anything anyway,” said Joe. He tasted the hot chocolate and smiled at her over the rim of the cup.
“What kind of things?” demanded Lee.
“Some questions needing answers,” said Carrie shortly, not wanting the conversation to get off-track. “Right now we’re more worried about Jamie.”
“As well you should be!” snapped Amanda. “How did you miss the fact that nobody was home at our place?”
“Believe it or not, we’re not always checking on what you’re doing over there!” yelled Joe. “It’s not like you leave a lot of clues for everyone to look at anyway!”
“Wait just a —” Carrie started. They ignored her and continued arguing right over her objection, but were finally interrupted by a sharp whistle from Lee. Amanda dropped her eyes to her mug. Joe scowled at his toes.
Lee glanced over at her. “What were you saying, Carrie?”
She reminded herself that she and Lee had to be the cool heads here, since Joe and Amanda were both justifiably petrified. “I said, wait just a minute. This isn’t about blame. If anyone’s to blame, it’s Jamie for skipping school. Has he done it before?”
Amanda shook her head, her eyes still on her drink.
“Not even once?”
“That wouldn’t be like Jamie,” said Joe. He’d softened his tone, but Carrie could still hear the tension underneath. “He’s a rule follower, not a rule breaker.”
“Then we need to figure out where he might have gone!” Carrie told them. “You can’t tell me he’s never feigned illness or something to get out of going to school. Every student does that sooner or later.”
Amanda sighed. “No. But it was usually because he hadn’t studied for a test. He never cut out from the house when he was ‘questionably’ sick.”
“He probably knew better than to push his luck,” said Joe. “Especially while Dotty was still around.”
“So we don’t have anything to start from?” asked Lee. “Is that what you’re saying? That we’ll have better luck pulling a rabbit out of a hat than we will figuring out where he would have gone?” He shook his head. “Zeta’s still out there with the clock ticking.”
“Perhaps,” said Carrie, “you should tell us about that.”
Lee lifted the mug to his lips and took a long swallow. “This is good, Carrie. Doesn’t taste like a store mix.” Then, before she could remind him of her question, he continued. “We’ve had a pair of agents working this case, Francine Desmond and Nancy Zusterakos. Nancy’s usually called Zeta since that’s easier to say.” In a few short sentences, he explained the current situation, including the note they’d found in her research and the deadline in the video message. “Crypto is still working on the note she left, but she wouldn’t have made it too difficult to figure out. I expect they’ll decipher it soon.”
Joe had a look of horror on his face. “You mean to tell me that this wasn’t about Amanda or you at all? That these East Germans may have been targeting Phillip? Over a school project?”
“That,” said Amanda, “is why we’re trying to find out how he really got the Segal Report. In his paper he claims three media sources, but we checked those already and none of them ever printed a copy of the report. I suppose he could have gone over to a university to see if they had a copy in their stacks, and I guess it would have had to have been one of the larger ones since they do more scientific research. But they probably wouldn’t have had a copy, either, since everything was all so new. I have no idea how Phillip got hold of that report, but something tells me that if we can figure that out, we can figure out who’s behind this and where we can find them. Francine and Zeta had eliminated a number of possibilities, but they hadn’t yet found one that actually makes sense. That report’s been kept under a lot of wraps and —” she broke off, turning to Lee. “Has anyone been over to our townhouse?”
“Not since we checked earlier,” said Carrie. “Do you want me to go over there?”
“No,” said Lee, standing up. “You and I are going up to his room here to see if we find anything out of the ordinary.” He held up a hand as Joe began to protest. “We have outside eyes, Joe. We won’t inadvertently miss something that you might, simply because you’re used to it.”
Joe clamped his lips down, but his eyes were shooting daggers.
“I’ll go over to our townhouse,” said Amanda. “If I can borrow a coat.”
Lee picked his up off the love seat and wrapped it around her. “We’ll be over in a little bit to go through his room there.”
“What about me?” asked Joe.
“You dropped him off,” said Lee. “So we know he took off from Swanson. What route might he have taken when he did that?”
“How am I supposed to figure that out?”
“Look at a map, find anyplace that might have caught his interest. Call around, see if anyone saw him earlier today. Anything could help.” He paused. “The quicker we solve this, the quicker we can get back to looking for Zeta.”
Joe was staring at him. “You’d put Jamie ahead of her?”
“He’s family.” The tone of his voice brooked no arguments. “Carrie, let’s go upstairs.” He gave Amanda a quick kiss before she left.
They searched in silence, starting at opposite corners of the room and working toward each other. Then Carrie heard a soft curse.
“What is it?” she asked.
Lee mutely held up the pamphlet he’d found in the kitchen a few days earlier. “It was hidden between the mattress and box spring.”
She felt her heart plummet. “Oh, no. How did he get that? I put it away after you left the other night. In Joe’s and my bedroom.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Lee. “What matters is that he knows about your deployment.”
Carrie had to fight the urge to curl up in a defensive ball. Stop that, she chastised herself. Lee’s not angry at you.
“Hey.” The word drew her out of her ruminations. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Let’s see what else we can find.”
But Lee didn’t start searching again. Instead he came over and hunkered down next to her. “Fight-or-flight’s not something you can ignore. Take a break.”
“I can’t afford the time.”
“Carrie.” His voice was firm. “Take a break.” Then he leaned forward, reaching for her but not quite touching. “You think I haven’t figured out you’ve been through some rough stuff, or that you’ve been getting triggered by some of what’s happened the last few weeks? Are you seeing anyone about it? Getting help?”
She hung her head. “Not right now. But I did do several years of therapy. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right.” There was sympathy in his voice now. “But don’t forget that you need to take care of yourself. You’re like Amanda that way. Pushing your own needs aside in favor of everyone else. There are days I’ve had to physically pull her away from something or someone, just to get her to rest normally. Does Joe know?”
She nodded, noticing that her breathing had become more even. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I’ve settled down.”
“If you get worked up again,” he said, “all you have to do is just say something. I’m…” his eyes briefly went distant. “Agents face trauma on a regular basis. We know what it can do. Neither Amanda nor I would ever judge you if you stepped back.”
At that, she actually managed to smile. “I’m all right, right now.”
“Good.” He stood up and went back to searching around the bed. Carrie did the same with the bookshelf, shaking her head. Those had been the actions of a friend. Could she and Lee be friends, given the tension that sometimes existed between Joe and Amanda? Oddly enough, she realized she hoped so.
Her hands pushed another book aside, causing a spiral-bound notebook to fall from the back of the bookshelf. Why had Jamie hidden that back here? Picking it up, she started leafing through it. “Lee, come look at this. The dates, I mean.”
He did, and his eyes widened. “This wasn’t an impulsive reaction to this morning’s assessment,” he breathed. “Jamie was planning to run away, and has been for a while.” He began flipping through the pages, and then his eyes met hers. “And he knew where he was going to go.”
“I think we’ve found what we’re looking for,” she agreed. “Let’s go back downstairs.”
Just as they got there, the front door opened, admitting a wild-eyed Amanda. “He’s been in his bedroom, sometime after we left for the Agency this morning. His duffel and some clothes are gone, and his bike’s missing. So is that transit pass that had been in Phillip’s book bag.” She was panting, having trouble getting the words out. “He took advantage of us moving to a townhouse just over the line from our old school district, and on the city bus routes. He didn’t just skip school. He ran away.”
Lee held up the notebook. “We know.”