CHAPTER NINETEEN

I SPENT THE NEXT few hours running through every conversation I had with Sarah, trying to figure out exactly when I should have known, at what point I could have intervened to prevent this.

Damn it, Margaret, didn’t you notice something? I wasn’t there, you saw her every day.

Yeah, that was really fair, especially when it looked as if my daughter was enticed into something because she was my daughter.

Hell, if I wanted to backtrack blame, we could go all the way back to when the Portal first opened. At the time it had seemed reasonable that I would want to stay and cover the story of the millennium—and with every passing year, hindsight told me that it was Margaret who had been the reasonable one.

The times I wanted to feel better about the divorce, I told myself it was inevitable. I was too work-centered for the marriage to work. When I was being honest, I told myself that I had just let it happen. It had been what I really wanted, Margaret and Sarah far enough away that I could concentrate on what I was doing without worrying about them. Jump into my career full tilt, guilt free, and my only family concerns the periodic phone call . . .

Payback’s a bitch.

Just waiting was killing me. I knew that I wasn’t the first father to go through this, and that this wasn’t the FBI’s first experience with kidnapping, but it felt all wrong to me. They should be out there doing something. I should be out looking for my daughter, not waiting here for some sort of contact that might never come.

Besides, I doubted that I’d receive any contact while the Feds were baby-sitting me.

“I’m not doing myself any good,” I whispered to myself. If I couldn’t do something productive, I should do something distracting. I got out of bed and opened the door. Agent Francis was flipping through a magazine.

“Mr. Maxwell?”

“You think one of your guys at my condo could bring me my laptop? I should probably try and get some work done. I have a column due tomorrow.”

Francis nodded. “If the forensic team’s done with it, I don’t think that will be a problem.” He picked up the phone.

“And I think I left some of my notes on the coffee table.”

“Sure—Hello, this is Francis, I’m with Mr. Maxwell. Yeah, he wants a couple of things from his condo if you’re done with them . . .”

 

With my hand wrapped up, I was reduced to a two-finger hunt-and-peck. That was okay. That was the speed my mind was working at. I was lucky that what was due was an op-ed piece rather than anything hard. I just wasn’t mentally up for that kind of fact-checking at the last minute. My notes from home might have a feature story on Mazurich buried in them, but I wasn’t up to digging it out.

Instead, I fleshed out a half-written piece about the rising star of Gregory Washington and his apparent inevitable ascension to the mayor ’s office. It was only eight hundred words, but it was close to midnight before I finished it.

At least Columbia will be happy.

I e-mailed the story to her.

I almost logged out, but I saw an unfamiliar e-mail address in my inbox.

Thinking it was news of my daughter, I opened it.

“Someone wants to help you. Midnight at the Superior Viaduct.”

“What?”

I glanced at the clock by my bed, and the digital numbers flashed 12:00 at me. “Great timing,” I whispered. “Maybe tomorrow . . .”

I looked back at my laptop, intending to respond to the offer of assistance, letting them know I wasn’t going to be able to attend any clandestine midnight meetings . . .

The e-mail was gone.

I tried to find the window on my desktop, I searched through the inbox, and the trash, and even tried downloading messages again, but it was gone.

The message didn’t exist, but I knew I had read it.

“Shit.”

“You okay in there, Mr. Maxwell?” Levi appeared in my doorway. The agents must have switched shifts.

“Yeah, I just deleted something by accident.” What was I supposed to do? Tell the Feds about it? And what if the guy contacting me was gun-shy? If someone really had help to offer, could I screw that up?

Then again, what if I imagined it?

Right now I couldn’t even prove that I had been sent anything. It could easily be fatigue catching up with me, granting me a little wishful thinking. I’d only seen it thirty seconds ago, and it was already too easy for me to dismiss it. Why should anyone else take it seriously—

Give it a break, you just don’t want to tell them.

I was sure that I had read the message. And going to the trouble of sending me a self-erasing e-mail strongly suggested that the sender only wanted to deal with me. Given what I was involved in, it was likely that I hadn’t been looking at an e-mail, strictly speaking. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that it was some sort of disguised enchantment, made up to look as if it was a normal e-mail. Mages had managed to send me messages that way, through electronic channels. It allowed some layer of camouflage—the mage can cast something on a server, or a switch box, or even wire conduit and the communication can go off at some preset time when the caster is nowhere near the site of the spell or the recipient.

The message had said midnight but didn’t specify a date.

So I had two options. Either the proposed contact was past and I was SOL, or the instruction was a general communication protocol, and any date I visited the site at the specified time, something or someone would present itself. It was easy enough to set up some standing enchantment that would reveal itself at the specified time.

Twenty-four hours.

If there was even a fraction of a chance, I was not going to allow Blackstone’s little army to screw it up. My daughter was a lot more important than his investigation.

“You should get some sleep,” Levi told me through the door.

“I know.” I yawned. Fatigue was finally starting to win over stress. Besides, I needed to get some rest if I was going to lose these guys and get to the Superior Viaduct for this meeting.

I shut off my laptop and tried to sleep.