Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [6]
Now he looked around. “Why isn’t my niece here?” Dark clouds gathered along his brow. “Has she been informed?”
“We tried.” Paull’s voice was mild and even. “It seems that Fearington is in lockdown.”
The clouds were fulminating. “At this ungodly hour?”
“Rehearsal lockdowns are designed to come at inconvenient times,” Jack said. “As in real life.”
“Indeed.” Which was what Henry Holt Carson said when he didn’t know how to respond and didn’t want to lose momentum. He abhorred silence the way nature abhors a vacuum. “This is unacceptable. The girl needs to know the altered state of her mother.”
“Is that what you call it?” Jack said.
“Listen, you”—Carson’s stubby forefinger stabbed the air like a dagger—“you’ve already done enough to that girl. As far as this family is concerned, you’re a fucking menace.”
“Oh, I see. This isn’t about Alli at all, is it?”
Carson took a step toward him. “The fuck it isn’t.”
Paull put his hands up. “Rancor isn’t appropriate, especially at this moment.”
The two men ignored him, glaring fixedly at each other.
“The. Fuck. It. Isn’t,” Carson repeated, emphasizing each word with a degree of menace. “And then you go and let my brother get killed.”
“Now it comes out. No one could have—”
“You should have.” Carson squared his shoulders like a linebacker ready to make an open field tackle. “I mean, that’s what Eddie was always saying about you—Jack can do this, Jack can do that. According to him you were a fucking wizard.”
“He had a squad of Secret Service agents whose job it was—”
“They weren’t you, McClure.” He was up on the balls of his feet now, his hands curled into fists. “They. Weren’t. You.”
At that moment, Paull’s phone burred. Something about the moment, the phone ringing in the dead of night, or the portentousness of the sound, stopped the escalating argument in its tracks.
The two men stared at Paull as he drew out the phone, checked the number on the readout, then took the call. For what seemed the longest time he said not a word. But his gray eyes slid across the room and met Jack’s. His expression was not encouraging.
“All right,” he said at length. “Make certain nothing gets out of control.” He sighed. “Yes, I know it’s already out of control. I meant—for God’s sake use your head, man!—don’t let it go any further. I’ll be right there.”
He closed the phone and stood staring into space for some time.
“Well,” Jack prompted, “what is it?”
Paull, seeking to pull himself together, turned to Jack. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and said, “That was Naomi Wilde.”
Jack’s adrenaline started to flow. “The Secret Service agent?”
Paull nodded. “She’s at Fearington. The lockdown isn’t a drill, Jack.”
* * *
FEARINGTON’S GROUNDS were as dark as an abandoned coal mine. Not a light shone, not a figure could be seen in the blackness where trees, training courses, and firing ranges loomed. It was as if she and her detail were the only ones on the academy campus as they crunched through a thin layer of frost. Her breath appeared before her like an apparition. Then, from behind her, lights popped on in the dorm rooms, first one, then others, like eyes opening. Heads in silhouette told her that some of her fellow classmates had been roused, despite the stealth of her detail.
She was led across the campus. Not a word was spoken. She could hear the soft crunch of their shoes in the icy grass, the brief slither of material against material. Just last week there were patches of snow, like the last tufts on a balding man’s scalp. Still, the cops’ shoulders were hunched against the chill. Out past the obstacle course, they turned left into a dense copse of towering beech trees, and she felt even more surrounded, hemmed in, and helpless.
All at once, the lead detective murmured into his wireless mike and three huge generator-driven floodlights snapped on, one after the other. They were trained on a space between the