7

FOR MOST OF THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED miles, Jack had been silent, allowing the Australian landscape passing on either side of the truck to put him in a place where he could think. Espy too had remained quiet, lost in her thoughts.

The idea had come to Jack not long after he and Espy had left Adelaide behind. He knew it was the only thing that made sense, and also what had made their trip more somber than an escape from certain capture warranted.

From the second he saw the guy tailing them in the airport, he wondered how McKeller could have gotten someone there so quickly. Jack had no doubt the man had extensive contacts worldwide, but he still clung to the belief that McKeller did not have the luxury of contacting friends in every city on the globe. Yet the evidence seemed to indicate he had the freedom to do just that.

That was when another, more disturbing possibility presented itself. Back at the airport, when Jack spied the third man, the one who’d shouted for Jack and Espy to stop—it wasn’t until later that Jack put a finger on something that had been nagging at him. It was the man’s voice, the accent decidedly Australian. It didn’t take long before Jack had convinced himself that the men at the airport weren’t allied with McKeller.

Aside from his own government, there was only one organization Jack knew of that had the resources—and the motivation—to track him across continents. For the last decade, that mysterious entity had stayed its hand, had allowed Jack and Espy to live in peace. But was it possible that they might have viewed Jack’s return to this place as a breaking of some unspoken truce?

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that in trying to escape one monster, they had woken another.

Every once in a while their driver—an older woman named Esther, who’d picked them up in a place called Balranald—glanced over at her two passengers, all of them crammed into the front and only seat of the pickup, and seemed to regard them with curiosity. She’d tried to pull them into conversation early on, and Espy had done her best to reciprocate, but the dialogue had a strained quality that saw it end within the first few miles.

With the revelation that they now likely faced two adversaries, Jack and Espy had been forced to reconsider their decision to head to London. But the more they discussed it, the more it seemed to them that little had changed. What Jack kept returning to was that they needed Elisha’s bones in order to secure the handing over of their children, and accomplishing that would have angered the guardians of the bones anyway.

The slowing of the truck pulled Jack out of his reverie. He refocused until he saw a sign just ahead. It said Wallsend. Esther took the exit and less than a minute later was pulling into a gas station. Jack looked down the road, saw nothing for miles. Soon Jack and Espy were standing in the gas station parking lot, bags in hand, watching the truck disappear, leaving them some seventy miles from Sydney. Once the truck disappeared around a curve in the road, Jack looked over at his wife.

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been someplace before?” he asked.

Espy smirked and started for the building. Esther had told them there were bus runs between Sydney and Newcastle, and as promised, Jack saw a sign marking the place as a stop. He followed Espy in and used some of their dwindling funds to buy sandwiches and water. Borrowing a bus schedule from the clerk, he noted the time of the next Sydney-bound bus, about thirty minutes away, then followed Espy outside, where they sank onto a bench partially shaded by a rusted metal overhang.

Once situated, Jack pulled out his phone and called Duckey.

“I have good news and bad news,” Duckey said before Jack could get a word in. “Which one do you want first?”

“It’s been a banner week,” Jack said. “Surprise me.”

“Your target’s dead,” Duckey said.

“My target?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t already decided to go to London and track down this Quinn Chambers.”

“He’s dead?” “Car crash, two years ago,” Duckey confirmed. “Played chicken with a cement mixer.”

“Suicide?”

“No one knows. All we know is there wasn’t much left of him to identify. A closed casket deal, if you get my meaning.”

Jack sat back heavily, feeling adrift. “What’s the good news?”

“I lied. There isn’t any,” Duckey said.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Now what?” Jack asked after a time.

“Beats me,” Duckey said. “But since you’ll probably end up going to London anyway, I took the liberty of digging up as much as I could about the deceased.”

“And I’m guessing you wouldn’t mention it if there wasn’t something there,” Jack said.

“Before you get too excited, I didn’t find out a whole lot. Primary address, next of kin, major business concerns—that sort of thing. What I can tell you is that he had about as many irons in the fire as Reese did. Industry, politics, high society, there probably weren’t too many influential people whose ear he didn’t have.”

A level of influence cultivated over thousands of years was the first thing that came to Jack’s mind, but he kept that to himself. He hadn’t told Duckey about his suspicions, that he believed Quinn Chambers was a part of the guardianship of the bones.

“Anyway, there’s a lot here. I’ve gone through it and made some notes, but you probably need to take a look yourself.”

“But both my phone and my computer now belong to the government,” Jack said.

“We’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” Duckey said. “Once you get to London, find a copy shop with a fax machine.”

“Are those still around?”

“I did notice one thing,” Duckey said, ignoring him. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything, but about every two years Chambers would take a trip to Paris. Always in October.”

Jack turned that over but failed to see the significance. “Isn’t London to Paris a pretty common business trip for someone in his position?”

“It is, except that in the month before his death, he made the trip no less than four times.” He paused, and there was the sound of pages rustling. “I’m not saying it means anything, but if something doesn’t fit the pattern, that’s what you should probably focus on.”

“So you think those trips have something to do with the recovery of the bones from Australia?”

“I don’t think any such thing,” Duckey said. “All I’m saying is that our boy did something he doesn’t normally do, and then he was dead a month later. You do with that what you will.”

As Jack processed what Duckey was telling him, something about the track of the conversation was giving him pause, and it took several seconds before it hit him. When this thing started, it was just a recovery operation, one that took them first to Australia and now to London. But as far as Duckey knew, Chambers was just a rich collector who had something Jack needed. Except that what he was describing—unexplained trips to Paris, a mysterious death that may have been a suicide—spoke to some kind of conspiracy. It made him wonder if Duckey suspected more than he was letting on.

“I’m not an idiot, Jack,” Duckey said, and the fact that he was addressing something Jack hadn’t vocalized almost made him drop the phone. “Chambers approached your brother-in-law and got the information he needed in order to locate the bones, after which he mobilized sufficient resources to find them in the middle of a desert. Now, I don’t know who this guy really is, but I’m guessing he didn’t go to all that trouble just to have some trophy to set on his mantel.”

“I think he’s one of them, Ducks,” Jack said.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. But if you’re right, that means you’re about to tick off a group of very powerful people. And need I remind you that you already have some of those after you?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jack said, deciding not to tell his friend that he suspected that horse was already out of the barn.

“But it may well be your last if you’re not careful.”

The road running in front of the gas station was quiet. Jack hadn’t seen a single vehicle pass since he’d sat down. He looked up, squinting against the glare of the early afternoon sun. “I guess that’s as good a segue as any. Ducks, I think you need to bow out of this now.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think that’s your call,” Duckey said.

“Except that this isn’t you doing background research when Reese was after me. This is you putting yourself and Stephanie in danger. McKeller knows you’re helping me. And once I make some new people mad, they’ll figure that out too. Which means at some point they’re going to force you to stop doing that.”

“If that happens, I’ll take care of it.”

Out of all the people he knew, Jack believed Jim Duckett to be the one most capable of coming out on top in an altercation with a rogue CIA agent. But that didn’t matter. He was about to say that when Duckey beat him to it.

“Jack, when Steph signed on, she knew what she was getting into. And if you think she’d let me write you off on account of her, then you don’t know my wife like I thought you did.”

Jack couldn’t help but smile at that. He only hoped that Duckey didn’t get in too deep.

“Understood, Ducks. And thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” his friend said.

When he hung up with Duckey, he sat on the bench next to his wife for a long while. He had almost dozed off when Espy reached over and took his hand.

“I think it’s time to make the call,” she said.

Jack knew the request was coming, and in truth he didn’t disagree with her. While he had a strong desire to avoid contacting McKeller—while he agreed with Duckey when he said they stood a better chance of recovering the bones by working alone—he simply couldn’t avoid initiating contact with the man who held his children.

He removed the phone from his pocket and reassembled it. After restoring power, he pulled up the list of calls made and received. There were several distinct numbers but one that stood out in frequency.

Someone picked up on the first ring.

“I’m assuming this is Dr. Hawthorne,” a man’s voice said.

“Which makes you Marcus McKeller,” Jack returned.

That was greeted with a chuckle. “You’re as resourceful as I expected you to be,” McKeller said.

“Resourceful and very, very angry,” Jack said.

McKeller didn’t answer right away. When he did, Jack thought he heard a note of regret.

“It was not my objective to take your sons. However, one learns to be fluid when one runs into unforeseen snags.”

“Did it ever occur to you to just knock on my door and ask me about the bones?”

That elicited another chuckle. “Had I felt certain you would have been forthcoming with the information I need, I would have done so.”

“Except that I don’t have anything you can use,” Jack said. “The bones are gone, lost. I have no idea where they are.”

“Then I suggest you find them,” McKeller said. “Or you will never see Jim and Alex again.”

At the sound of his sons’ names, Jack felt anger rising. “Where are they?”

“Safe,” McKeller said. “For now.”

“Let me speak with them,” Jack demanded.

“They’re not here.”

Jack’s heart sank.

“I need you to come in, Dr. Hawthorne. I need you to tell me where you’re going now that you’ve left Adelaide.”

“I work alone,” Jack said. “I always have.”

“That’s not how this is going to work,” McKeller said.

“That’s precisely how it’s going to work,” Jack countered. “You have my children, and my aim is to get them back. The only way I know how to do that is to find the bones so that you can take care of your wife. And to do that, I need to work alone.”

Jack had taken a gamble in mentioning McKeller’s wife. The man’s pause indicated such. Jack took advantage of the break.

“I’ll call you when I have them,” he said. “And I promise you, if anything happens to my boys, you will pay dearly.” Then Jack ended the call.

Not long after that, he and Espy were on a bus heading into Sydney. The phone, still powered on, lay in the back of a pickup heading the other direction.