Chapter Twenty-Five
“Shit, shit, shit!” She held on to the steering wheel with both hands, waiting for her vision to clear, her heart to stop galloping.
She turned around. Jake was sitting in the backseat. He looked transformed since they’d last met in person, his head completely shaved, a reddish Vandyke beard and mustache on his face. If it hadn’t been for the voice and the John Lennon glasses, she’d never have recognized him. He’d caught Daniel’s walking stick and had it pointed at her like a javelin.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” she said, her voice shaking. It felt as if Jake had sucked the oxygen from the air in the closed car. She gasped for breath. That’s when she saw the cell phone, sitting on the seat beside him.
Idiot! A pall of mortification settled over her. No wonder GROB had used a voice synthesizer. GROB was Jake.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, please, don’t freak out.” In a single fluid move, he slid between the front bucket seats and into the front passenger seat.
Diana screamed and pressed herself against the door. She had to get out of there. She clawed for the handle, but before she could open the door there was a dull thock. Doors locking. Diana felt her blood thrumming in her ears. Her keys were no longer in the ignition.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Jake said. “I’m sorry for freaking you out.”
“Let me out,” she said. “Jake, please, let me out now. Whatever you have to say to me, you can say it out there.” He didn’t move.
“Help!” she screamed, banging at the window. “Help, help!” She screamed as loud as she could, but not a single person was near enough to hear, and the tinted glass made her invisible. She started to reach into the backseat for the walking stick.
“Stop!” Jake cupped his hand behind her head, twined his finger in her hair, and pulled it taut, immobilizing her. “Calm down. I was afraid you’d be like this.”
“Ow!” she cried as he tightened his grip, and she felt the skin pulling at the corners of her eyes.
“I can explain.” He brought his face close to hers and stared back at her. “Let me explain. Okay?”
Diana could smell coffee breath, aftershave, and the metallic scent of her own fear. She took a shuddering breath and managed a nod. Jake loosened his grip.
“Okay?” he said.
She nodded again. Slowly Jake let go. They sat in silence for a few moments, and Diana felt as if she were in a cage staring out at him. Her chest hurt as she took in air and exhaled.
“O-kay. Let’s start over,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to do it this way, but I need you to come with me. Diana, it’s okay, really it is.” He was talking to her like she was a child. “You can trust me.”
“Trust”—Diana’s voice was hoarse—“is something you earn. You trick me to get me to come here. Hide in the backseat and then scare me half to death, and now I’m supposed to trust you?”
“I’m sorry. I had to wait in the Hummer because I wasn’t sure it was you. You look . . . different from what I was expecting.”
“I thought I was meeting . . . There’s nothing wrong with my sister, is there?”
His silence confirmed it.
“You made me think she was deathly ill. My sister, the last person I can trust in this world. Except for you, of course. Don’t you realize—?”
He returned her entreaty with a blank stare. Of course he didn’t realize. Couldn’t, really. Jake had never been able to fathom anyone’s emotions but his own paltry array of them.
“Jake, why didn’t you just ask me to meet you?”
“And you would have come?”
She thought about that. “Maybe not right away. But eventually I—”
“I couldn’t wait for eventually.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can explain, but not here. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated. I wanted to show you this amazing place we’ve got set up.”
“We?”
“You’ll see. I promised I wouldn’t tell you. But you know how you wanted to track down the hackers who’ve been after our clients? Well, now you’re going to get your wish.”
This was about Volganet? Were they part of Jake’s post-Daniel business model? Nadia set up the chumps and then Volganet fleeced them—with Jake collecting from both sides.
“So we have a silent partner?” she asked.
He gave her a narrow look, as if he was trying to glean what she knew. “I guess you could call it that.” Uncertainty was something she’d rarely seen in Jake.
“And what if I don’t want to go with you?”
“Diana, after what happened with your sister, I’d understand. But I think you’ll change your mind, once you see everything. And if we get there and you decide you don’t want to stay, I promise you can leave. Trust me.”
“Trust you? I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Fair enough. But come with me and let me show you.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out her keys. “Here. You can get out right now, or you can drive.”
As Diana stared at the keys he offered to her, she realized that she really didn’t have anywhere to go back to.
The wipers swept slowly back and forth, across the windshield, and drizzle had turned to a steady rain by the time Diana drove past the town’s final convenience store and the driveway to the last house abutting the road. Jake, who’d looked tense when she’d started the car and pulled back out into the street, had settled into his seat.
When they reached the highway entrance, he said, “Just stay with the road we’re on.”
The terrain was hilly and the road narrowed as it snaked through dense forest, a blur of trees surging past on either side. Jake leaned forward and peered through the windshield as the wipers stroked and cleared.
“We’re almost there. Slow down,” he said.
She remembered the map of this area and tried to imagine where “there” was—north, or maybe northwest of Mill Village, five or six miles. There’d been a lake or reservoir in this direction.
“Turn there,” he said, pointing to a dirt road.
Diana slowed and turned onto it. It was impossible to go more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour on the rutted surface.
“It’s a ways in,” Jake said. “Just keep going.”
In a thicket of brush and trees, Diana could make out what had once been a building foundation. The chimney and the remains of a brick wall seemed to be standing in a shroud of fog. Beyond that they passed a field and a small pond.
The car lurched and once again they were on paved road, skirting a perimeter of chain-link fencing that surrounded a multistory brick complex that looked like an old industrial mill. The first-floor windows were boarded over, but on the floors above, glass was all still intact.
The Hummer rocked in and out of potholes before Diana had to come to a halt at a sliding gate. Jake took his own cell phone from his jacket pocket, punched in a number, and a few moments later the gate clanked and slid open.
“Go ahead,” he said, pointing ahead. “Not much further.”
Diana hesitated.
“Change your mind?” Jake said. “Because I can get out right here and walk the rest of the way. You can turn around and go home. But if you want to know what’s going on, the answer is here.” He pointed straight ahead.
Diana drove the car through the gate. On the other side, she stopped and twisted around, watching through the rain-shrouded rear window at the gate sliding shut behind them. She turned and peered through the front windshield.
“We’re almost there,” Jake said.
Diana drove past what looked like the building’s main entrance, now a padlocked door, and on around the corner. Jake opened the car window. Cold, damp air surged into the car, anchoring Diana’s senses. She exhaled a puff of dragon’s breath.
“Smell that?” Jake said.
Diana sniffed and noticed the air was tinged with sweetness that reminded her of an ice-cream shop.
“This was once a chocolate factory and that”—Jake indicated a massive white silo, about thirty feet in diameter and standing about eight stories tall; a metal ladder spiraled around the outside of it, ending in a small doorway two-thirds of the way up—“is where they used to store the chocolate.
“Is that cool or what?” Jake said. He rolled the window back up. “In warm weather the smell carries for miles. Kids used to say the water in the reservoir tasted like cocoa. It doesn’t.”
Above the hum of the car engine and the steady rain, Diana could hear water rushing. She continued driving slowly around the complex, and on the other side of the building was a body of water maybe a half mile wide, its surface dimpled like orange skin by falling rain. At the end nearest the silo, water cascaded over a dam.
“Park in there,” Jake said, pointing to a covered bank of loading docks at the back of the building. The car rocked side to side as it rolled over brush that sprouted from holes in the cement approaches.
Already backed into one of the shadowy bays was a black limousine. Diana pulled in alongside it and shut down the engine.
“You want this?” Jake asked, handing her Daniel’s driftwood walking stick.
She took it and got out of the car. The smell of mildew and rotting leaves overwhelmed the chocolate. She touched the hood of the limo. It was warm, like it had been recently driven. Was that how Jake had gotten to Mill Village? One of his new partners drove him there? She wondered if this was the same limousine she’d seen cruising down her street. Was it the car that had blocked her into her driveway?
When Jake got out, he had her backpack and laptop. “I’m going to need all that?” she asked.
“Once you see the setup, you’re going to want to stay.”
As she slipped from between the cars, Jake fell in close behind her and ushered her up a few broad steps and onto a loading platform. A door along the back wall was propped open with a cinder block. He grabbed a flashlight that was sitting on a capped standpipe and turned on the beam. “You ready?”
Diana took a deep inhale of the chocolate-scented air.
“On belay,” Jake said. It was what the belayer told a climber after he’d anchored the rope, the equivalent of I’m ready and I’ve got your back.
“Ready to climb,” she said.
“Climb on.” With a hand on Diana’s back, Jake guided her inside.