He knows it won’t be easy for him now. He’s America’s most wanted. There’s nowhere he can go where he won’t be recognized instantly. He’ll be prey for anyone with a phone, looking to cash in on the huge reward being offered for his capture. Now the price on his head is far greater than the value his adoptive parents ever saw in him.
His future will all come down to a phone. The first one he sees will be either his salvation or his ruin depending on who gets to dial it first: him or the phone’s owner, who will most certainly be calling the police.
Still dizzy from the tranqs, he makes his way through the woods to a highway, forcing his stiff legs to walk at a brisk pace, generating body heat, but still shivering with every step. A mile and a half up the road, he comes to a service area and hurries into the glorious warmth of a convenience store. He quickly sizes up the people there. A grisly looking clerk, a family deciding on snacks, and an old man in filthy jeans trying to scrounge up enough coins for a lottery ticket. No one looks at him as he slips into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He sits on the toilet, fully clothed, too dehydrated to even pee, and gets his shivering under control. It takes longer than he thought it would, and finally the clerk bangs on the door.
“You okay in there, dude?”
“Yeah, I’ll be out in a second.”
He takes another minute, flexing the fingers of his good hand, and stands, noting that the last of his tranq vertigo has worn off. Then he steps back out into the convenience store, where another family argues about snacks, and a woman baffled by the coffee machine tries to figure out which is decaf and which is regular. The clerk is busy ringing up a fat man’s gas, and Starkey gets down to business.
He goes outside, where the fat man’s car waits, the gas hose still in the tank. Lo and behold, there’s a phone plugged into a charger on the console inside. Starkey opens the door, but as he reaches for the phone, a kid in the shadows of the backseat yells, “Hey! Get outta here! Dad! Help!”
Starkey flinches, but it’s too late to abort.
“Sorry, kid.” He grabs the phone, disconnecting it from the charger, but the kid continues to scream, and the father bursts out of the shop.
Starkey curses himself for the clumsiness of the theft. As a magician, he always prided himself on his ability to slip things like watches, wallets, and phones in and out of pockets without being noticed. It’s demoralizing to be so desperate that he must steal so inelegantly.
With the man taking chase, Starkey sprints into the dark brushy field behind the convenience store, continuing to run long after the cries of the kid and his furious but ponderously slow father can no longer be heard.
When he’s sure he’s too far away to be seen or followed, he checks the phone. For a moment, he thinks its interface is locked and he won’t be able to use it, but luckily, the man was not expecting his phone to be taken from the safety of his vehicle. Starkey pulls up a dial screen and keys in the emergency number he’d been given. It rings twice, then a nondescript voice answers the phone with a standard, “Hello?”
“This is Mason Starkey,” he says. “Something’s happened. I need help.”
He quickly explains the situation as best he can in a single breath. And calmly the voice on the other end of the line says, “Stay where you are. We’ll come to you.”
Following the instructions he’s given, Starkey keeps the phone powered on, to be used as a homing beacon, and within an hour, a helicopter descends from the night sky like the proverbial stork to carry him to a place of greater safety.
• • •
Starkey has no idea where he’s been taken. It’s a city. That’s all he knows. He’s not so sophisticated as to know the silhouettes of a skyline at the earliest hint of dawn. All he knows for sure is that it’s near a large body of water, and that it’s colder than where he was, as evidenced by the blast of chilly air when they open the helicopter door and escort him from the rooftop heliport. It’s a tall building, but not the tallest. Average, as far as skyscrapers go.
He knew the clapper movement was well funded and well organized, but to have such headquarters in plain sight gives Starkey pause for thought. In his own imagination, the clapper movement was far grittier and more counterculture. Hiding, perhaps in the dangerous backrooms of questionable clubs. That they have their own office building, however, is somehow more unsettling. The logo on the building—he saw it as the helicopter approached—is a simple design he did not recognize. It featured the initials “PC,” which seem fairly generic and could stand for a great many things.
He’s escorted down a flight of stairs and into an elevator by two men in dark suits with chests too well developed for them to be anything but security boeufs. The elevator takes him down to the thirty-seventh floor, and he’s brought to a conference room with black leather chairs and a long table of blue marble. No one is present.
“Wait here,” one of the guards says. “Someone will be along shortly.”
The room has only one door, which the men lock as they exit, leaving him alone. There are east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, but they’re made of the kind of frosted glass that diffuses light while denying a view. Translucent rather than transparent. The rising sun is little more than a golden haze.
He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, “Buckle in.” The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they’ve placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he’s respected and valued. And yet, there’s unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.