Hostage Zero

The information provided by Alice Navarro Harper turned out to be invaluable. The man once known as Bruce Navarro was now Tony Planchette, and his new address was Standard, Alaska, twenty miles or so west of Fairbanks. He’d stayed in reasonably steady contact with his sister over the years, despite the continuing surveillance from both sides of the law, by blanketing Jersey City with junk mail advertising whatever bogus product best served the coded messages on the cards. Technically it was mail fraud, but Gail thought it was a brilliant-albeit expensive-means of covert communication. He mailed thousands of cards so he could communicate with his one sister.

When Alice shared the stack of coupons she’d accumulated over the years, Gail realized that the accumulated newspapers and magazines in the house were a ruse to camouflage the stack of messages in the minds of anyone who might want to conduct a search. Bruce used a random rotating cipher, the key for which was embedded in the numbers under an otherwise meaningless bar code. The text itself often read as gibberish that must have annoyed the crap out of some of the recipients, but at the rate of one every six or eight weeks, apparently no one ever got angry enough to call the authorities.

Besides, this was America. If you wanted to pay the freight to post gibberish to the community, it was your God-given right to do so.

The essence of the various messages was fairly chatty, offering details on how he was adapting to an invisible life. Gail got the sense that they were as much a reassurance to his sister that he was still alive as they were any real communication.

And, unless Alice was concealing something, there was no mechanism in place for Bruce to get any information in return. For Bruce’s safety, Alice had to assume that all of her outgoing communication was carefully monitored, and all it would take to raise the heat to intolerable levels would be for them to suspect that she was corresponding with Bruce. That alone would confirm that he was alive, and from there, nothing good could possibly follow.

This was Gail’s first trip to Alaska, and as she drove her rented Jeep away from the airport parking lot of the Fairbanks airport, she was surprised how featureless an area it was. No hills to speak of, lots of trees and squatty construction that looked as weather-ravaged as any she’d ever seen. It wasn’t that the place was ugly; it just wasn’t as exotic as she’d wanted it to be.

Gail had spent the final two hours of her flight from Dulles studying the satellite photos that Venice had been able to download for her, showing the location of Bruce Navarro’s home and the geographical features that surrounded it. It had taken some doing, too, since the public satellite mapping sites don’t have a lot of detail of this part of the world. Venice had had to enlist the aid of SkysEye, a private satellite mapping company owned by Lee Burns, a longtime friend of Jonathan’s. For a ridiculous annual subscription fee plus even more ridiculous tasking fees, Lee Burns’s orbiting spy network could accomplish amazing things.

Navarro’s change in lifestyle had been huge. He went from manicured acreage with horse stables and a swimming pool in the midst of unspeakable wealth in Great Falls, Virginia, to a foundation-mounted double-wide in the middle of nowhere.

Standard, Alaska, turned out to be less a town than a navigational benchmark along the Alaskan Railway north of Gold-stream Creek. If you wanted to disappear from the face of the earth, this was a good place to go.

Navarro would be armed, she reasoned. Certainly he had firearms at his disposal. Out here, he’d be out of his mind not to, just to take care of the occasional marauding grizzly bear. Plus, he’d assumed the mantle of a loner specifically because people were hunting him with the intent to kill. If that didn’t make someone quick to the trigger, she didn’t know what would.

Gail opened her door and stepped out into the pleasant fresh air. She pegged the temperature to be somewhere in the mid-seventies; perfect weather, complete with a pleasant breeze that would help mask the noise of her approach.

Close up like this, the house was more substantial than it appeared to be from the satellite photos. The footprint of the building was the same as a double-wide trailer, but it had clearly been built in place. The weathered clapboard siding appeared to have once been dark green-forest green, she supposed-but unrelenting heat, cold, wind, and rain had taken the luster away.

Nerves kicked in as she climbed the three steps from the ground onto the covered stoop. She fought the urge to draw her weapon as she rapped on the door.

Through the open window on her left, she heard movement-a lot of movement, in fact, as if someone had jumped from height onto the floor. The noise was followed by mild cussing, and then silence.

“Mr. Planchette?” Gail called. “Are you all right, sir?”

No words, but more movement.