Donnie shakes his head. He and Benny vowed to never go back to that wretched town.
The agent displays the screen of his phone again. It’s a photo of a woman. Grainy footage from a low-end surveillance camera. She’s standing outside a marble building.
“You recognize this woman?”
Donnie shakes his head.
Rodriguez says, “Footage shows her outside the Eastern District of Pennsylvania courthouse building on multiple occasions, including three days ago, the last time anyone saw Judge Wood.”
“I thought you caught the guy who did it? One of the criminals Benny put away.”
The agent sighs. “An arrest has been made. But the investigation is ongoing. The woman is a person of interest, someone we want to speak to. She wasn’t originally a high priority, but…”
“But what?” Donnie grabs the word, since there’s obviously a reason the guy is asking about her.
“We got a facial-recognition hit.” The agent swipes his phone again. He pulls up a photo of a white woman. It could be the same woman from outside the courthouse, but it’s hard to say. She’s young, pronounced cheekbones, cat eyes, sultry.
“Who is she?”
“We’re not sure. We got a hit and tracked it to a passport database.”
Donnie doesn’t understand.
“It’s a fake passport, but we think it’s the same woman.”
When it’s clear Donnie still isn’t getting it, the agent says, “She was a passenger on your cruise.”
CHAPTER TEN
JENNA
Jenna ditched the scooter and is fast-walking down Tenth Street when the phone rings. It comes up as only a number, no name. It’s not in the scooter guy’s contacts. She answers.
“It’s me,” Simon says. “You’re sure?” He’s using a burner phone like they discussed when they made this contingency plan.
Their marriage is nothing like the cliché in the movies where the spouse is blindsided by their loved one’s secret history. Before Jenna agreed to marry him, she told Simon everything. Well, nearly everything. Enough for him to be clear-eyed and understand the risks of living the rest of his life with her. Actually, there was some cliché to it—he proposed on the promenade outside the Eiffel Tower.
She said, Yes, but …
Using his overly analytical mind, Simon had weighed the costs and benefits. Probably made a spreadsheet of pros and cons.
“Like the movie Nikita?” he asked. “You were taken as a kid and trained to…”
“Not as glamorous, but yes.”
After digesting it all, Simon figured she was safe, that her former employer, a government contractor with no name that its employees called The Corporation, had no reason to come after her.
But just in case, they developed an emergency plan.
Simon is an inveterate planner, an occupational hazard. They agreed on a code, something only they would know. Simon chose “Alas Babylon,” which is weird, but he said it was from a book he’d read when he was a kid. If either of them ever used the code, they would hightail it out to the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. A cabin in Bath County that Simon purchased through a web of shell companies. A trail only a tax lawyer could untangle.
“Yes, I’m so sorry.”
There’s a leaden silence. He’s processing.
Jenna says, “You get Lulu. I’m on my way to get Willow. We need to be fast.”
Simon is still quiet. He’s breathing heavily into the phone. Jenna hears the tapping of computer keys. He’s at his desktop.
“Lulu’s at school, I can see her on the webcam,” he says. Lulu’s kindergarten teacher has a live webcam parents can log on to. The high school teachers aren’t so generous, but to Willow’s consternation, she accepted their locator on her cell phone. “And Willow’s pinging at the school.”
“Good. Don’t bring your phone, it can be tracked. Use the burner. I’m sorry, I—”
“I knew what I was getting into,” he cuts her off. “We’ll meet you at the—”
“Don’t say it.” This time she interrupts, not wanting him to reveal where they’re headed. It’s unnecessary. Both phones are untraceable to them. But there are laser microphones that can pick up conversations four hundred meters away. And she’s learned over the years that survival favors the cautious. “I love you,” she says, and hangs up, not wanting to hear the pain and fear—and possibly regret at ever meeting her—in his voice.
She needs to get to Willow’s school. The scooter hipster’s phone will probably work for another fifteen minutes before he gets hold of his carrier and it’s disabled. She thumbs the Uber app, orders the car. She’s got no money, no credit cards, and soon she’ll have no phone. But she and Willow are going to make it to the cabin.
As she waits for the ride, Jenna surveys the area. Tenth Street is like much of downtown D.C.: glass office buildings filled with lawyers and lobbyists amid a smattering of redbrick old row houses converted into coffee shops alongside small roadside parks with benches occupied by the growing homeless population. No one is paying her any mind. Just another Washingtonian staring at her phone, waiting for an Uber or Lyft.
She tries to control her breathing, harness the fear and adrenaline ripping through her. Some of her colleagues at The Corporation loved feeling like this: the high from the chase, the epinephrine from the mission. That’s how they got you: The Corporation taught you to crave that feeling; it meant that you were alive, that you had a purpose in this world. But for Jenna, it’s always a Proustian moment, something that evokes a buried sensation—the deep sense of dread—rooted in the first time she ever ran for her life. What her stepdaughter Willow might call a trigger.
Her first night at Savior House.
At fifteen, Jenna’s heard of scary Chestertown—which is about three burgs over from her modest home in Linwood, Pennsylvania—somewhere her parents and the other grown-ups refer to only in whispers, a place you wouldn’t want your car to break down at night.
The social worker pulls to the curb. The group home looks like it was once a grand mansion from another era but now resembles a run-down haunted house from a black-and-white movie or Scooby-Doo cartoon. The social worker introduces her to the man who runs the place—Mr. Brood—a hulking figure who wears a cardigan that gives him the appearance of Mr. Rogers on steroids. It’s dinnertime, kids are shuffling to the dining room, but Mr. Brood says she can be excused from dinner, this one time. He’s stern but isn’t mean. More matter-of-fact. He and the social worker talk briefly before the woman shows Jenna to her room. Three beds are in a line, each with a large trunk at the foot. Jenna doesn’t say anything, just curls up on the mattress, buries her head in the pillow, which is lumpy and yellowed and has no pillowcase.
She barely had a chance to say goodbye to her parents. Mom and Dad always went bowling on Tuesdays. Jenna should’ve said, I love you, or hugged them. But she’d been talking on the phone with Gigi, stretching the kitchen phone cord so it reached the stairs where she could whisper and giggle and conspire with her friend without her parents eavesdropping. Everything changed in a split second when the police came to the door. No more Friday nights at Blockbuster searching for movies with