Chapter 5 - THE BROKEN GLASSES AND THE PORTLAND VOUCHER
Daniel’s fingers closed around Amy’s broken tortoiseshell reading glasses. The left lens was spider-webbed from a shoe heel, the metal hinge bent at an unnatural angle.
She was four months pregnant. She had spent the last twelve weeks battling morning sickness alone in their bathroom while he was in airport lounges—and twenty minutes ago, two men hired by an international smuggling ring had cornered her in a concrete parking garage at JFK.
"Call Port Authority Police to Level 2 right now!" Daniel shouted over his shoulder to the dispatcher, already vaulting over the concrete median into the rain toward the Avis garage.
He took the concrete stairs three at a time, his tuxedo shoes slipping on the wet steps, the sound of his own ragged breathing echoing off the low concrete ceiling. When he burst through the fire door onto Level 2, the rows of parked rental cars stretched out under buzzing fluorescent tubes.
Halfway down Row D, beside a white concrete support pillar, stood an unoccupied silver Ford Explorer with its driver’s side door hanging wide open and the dome light chiming steadily in the damp air.
"Amy!" Daniel’s voice tore at his throat as he sprinted toward the open SUV. "Amy!"
There was no one inside the vehicle. The keys were lying on the wet asphalt beneath the running board, next to a spilled paper cup of ginger ale.
Directly behind the Explorer, fresh black tire marks scarred the concrete where another heavy vehicle had reversed at high speed.
Daniel dropped to his knees beside the open car door, his heart slamming so violently against his ribs he felt dizzy. "No, no, no..."
"Hold it right there, buddy! Hands where I can see 'em!"
A flashlight beam hit Daniel squarely in the eyes. A sixty-year-old Avis night-shift lot attendant in a reflective yellow vest was stepping out from behind the steel security cage at the end of the row, holding a heavy iron tire wrench in one hand and a cell phone in the other.
"She’s my wife!" Daniel held up the broken tortoiseshell glasses with trembling hands, not getting up from his knees. "Amy Harrison—brown hair, navy coat! Two men in a black Charger with Quebec plates—did they take her?!"
The older attendant lowered the wrench an inch, squinting at Daniel’s soaked tuxedo and pale, terrified face.
"They didn't take her, son," the attendant said, jerking his chin toward the steel security booth behind him. "They tried to. Grabbed her arm right as she was putting her bag in that Explorer."
"Where is she?!" Daniel scrambled to his feet.
"Gone," the attendant said, a trace of grudging respect in his voice. "Your wife’s got a hell of a head on her shoulders. The second she saw that black Charger coming up the ramp in her rearview mirror, she didn't try to start the engine—she hit the panic alarm on the key fob, threw her cup of hot ginger tea straight into the first guy's face when he reached for her coat, and ducked through the pedestrian turnstile into my locked security cage while the alarm was blaring."
Daniel let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped in his chest since Manhattan. "She’s safe? She wasn't hurt?"
"Scratched her wrist on the turnstile gate and dropped her glasses, that’s all," the attendant said. "The two goons in the Charger saw my security cameras swiveling toward their license plate and heard the Port Authority siren downstairs, so they burned rubber out the exit ramp four minutes ago."
"Where did she go?" Daniel asked, stepping toward the steel cage. "Is she inside the office?"
"Nope," the attendant shook his head. "I offered to call the cops or an ambulance for her wrist. She looked at me, calm as ice even though she was shaking like a leaf, and said, 'Sir, the people those men work for have someone inside my husband’s company in New York. If my name goes on a police blotter tonight, they’ll know exactly which hospital or hotel I’m at.' Then she gave me two hundred dollars cash to let her out the service freight elevator on the backside of the AirTrain terminal before the cops got up the ramp."
Daniel stared at the empty freight elevator doors at the back of the cage.
Even terrified, bleeding, and four months pregnant, Amy hadn't called him for help. Because in her mind, Daniel was the man dancing under a chandelier with the woman whose father had just sent two thugs after her.
Wait—if she didn't take the silver Ford Explorer, and she had given away her Delta plane ticket at Terminal 4... how was she leaving New York?
"Did she say anything else?" Daniel asked desperately, looking around the small attendant’s booth. "Did she make a phone call? Look up a train schedule?"
"Didn't have a phone on her," the attendant said, walking back into the booth and pointing to a crumpled yellow carbon-copy slip lying beside the manual imprint machine on the counter. "Wait a second. Before those guys pulled up, when she first handed me the prepaid rental voucher for the Explorer, she asked me to print out the secondary return-drop address on the voucher account so she could program the GPS."
Daniel lunged across the counter and picked up the yellow carbon slip.
The prepaid rental voucher hadn't been booked under Amy’s name. It had been booked forty-eight hours earlier under the name Claire Lindqvist—using a corporate travel account belonging to the Pacific Northwest Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon.
And the scheduled vehicle return location wasn't in New York. It was a one-way cross-country drop-off at the regional Avis depot in Newport, Oregon, seven days from today.
"Claire," Daniel breathed.
He remembered Claire Lindqvist—Amy’s college roommate from Barnard, the only bridesmaid at their wedding who had looked Daniel dead in the eye during the reception toast and said, 'Take care of her, Daniel, because she’ll give you everything she has until there’s nothing left.'
Wait—if the men in the Charger had seen her at the Avis garage, why would Amy abandon the rental car if she still intended to go to Oregon?
Daniel looked closer at the yellow carbon slip. On the back of the paper, where Amy had tested a ballpoint pen before signing the mileage waiver, were three sets of numbers written in her neat, tiny archivist’s shorthand:
TR-49 / CHI-8:40 / AMK-27.
Daniel stared at the shorthand for five seconds before his logistics brain decoded it instantly.
Train 49. The Lake Shore Limited to Chicago. Connecting to Amtrak Train 27—the Empire Builder to Portland, Oregon.
She wasn't flying, where TSA cameras and passenger manifests would flag her driver’s license for Vanessa’s syndicate contacts. And she had abandoned the SUV at JFK because she knew the Charger had spotted the rental lot. She had taken the AirTrain from the back of the garage straight to Jamaica Station to catch the late-night sleeper train out of Penn Station’s Hudson corridor.
Just then, Daniel’s cell phone vibrated in his wet tuxedo pocket.
It was his mother calling from the penthouse.
"Daniel!" Margaret’s voice was breathless and tight with alarm. "Detective Miller just arrived with two federal customs agents and took Vanessa into custody—but Daniel, before they put her in the squad car, the customs agent ran the serial numbers on the six Brussels containers from Amy’s file!"
"I know, Mom, they’re docking in Newark next Tuesday—"
"No, Daniel! Not Newark!" Margaret shouted over the roar of a jet taking off overhead. "The customs agent said Newark was the decoy manifest Vanessa left in the file! Two of those containers were already offloaded forty-eight hours ago at the Port of Portland in Oregon—and the third is sitting at a private rail spur in Newport, Oregon, registered to a cold-storage warehouse leased under your signature!"
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Daniel froze on the wet concrete of the parking garage.
"Wait... Newport, Oregon?" Daniel whispered, his blood turning to ice. "Mom, Amy isn't hiding from us in Newport. Claire Lindqvist works for the maritime museum in Oregon—Claire helped Amy trace the smuggling route to the West Coast! Amy isn't running away... she’s going to Newport by herself to get the physical customs seals off those containers so the feds can't arrest me!"
