weren’t distracted at all. This wasn’t an accident.
They were going to ram her.
Frantically, Kate dug at the oars, drawing the tiny shell around in the face of the oncoming craft. Jesus! Her eyes got wide, staring at it. We’re going to hit! At the very last second, there was a deafening honk. The boat, its lumbering, massive hull right above her, veered. Kate screamed. There was a sickening, grating sound—her oar shattering in two. Her shell was lifted in the wake like a flimsy toy.
The boat ripped through the back of her scull.
Oh, God … no.
The next thing Kate knew, she was underwater. It was murky and freezing cold, and it hit her like concrete. The river rushed into her lungs. Kate kicked, thrashing her arms in the boat’s violent eddy. She felt like she was fighting for her life. She desperately tried to push her way up.
Suddenly she realized—You can’t come up here, Kate.
These people are trying to kill you.
Every cell in her body was crying out in confusion and panic. She scissor-kicked underwater and swam, praying there was enough air in her lungs, as far as her strength would take her. She wasn’t sure in which direction. When her lungs felt as if they were giving out, she clawed her way to the surface. She was disoriented for a second, gasping for precious, needed oxygen. She caught sight of the shore. The Bronx shore. About thirty yards away. The only person who could help her now was on the other side.
Kate spun around and spotted the launch boat circling in the vicinity of her capsized craft. Nearby she saw the pieces of her blue Peinert shell, severed in two. She saw the man with the dark, knotted hair in the stern of the boat scanning the wreckage. Slowly his gaze veered in a widening arc, moving toward the shoreline.
It landed squarely on her.
Jesus, Kate, you’ve got to get out of here now.
She sucked in a lungful of air and dove back underwater. For a few seconds, she swam parallel to the shore, petrified to come up. Then it got narrow and shallow and her muscles started giving out, and she swam the last, agonizing yards and pulled herself up, gulping convulsively, onto the rocky bank. She rolled over, too exhausted to even care about her safety. Her eyes drifted back to where she thought she should find the boat.
It was gone.
She saw it moving away, chugging full speed down the river. Ponytail was still in the stern, staring back.
Kate dropped her head onto the soil and coughed out a lungful of oily, fuel-smelling water. Somehow the boat had veered away—at the very last second. If it hadn’t, she’d be dead.
She didn’t know if they had tried to kill her or if she had just been warned. Either way, she understood what it meant.
Mercado was no longer just a name, or a threat.
It was the key to her survival now.
She had already made up her mind, long before the police ever got to her.
Long before the launch, which had been stolen the day before from a boatyard on City Island, had been found abandoned on an East River pier.
Before the gash on her arm from the splintered oar had been treated and bandaged, and before Greg had rushed up to the hospital to take her home and before she broke down when she saw him, realizing just how lucky she was to be alive.
She had made up her mind back on the shore.
What she had to do.
With her lungs on fire, her fingers pressed into the wet but precious soil, with the boat that had almost cut her in two chugging away, and the unmistakable look of clarity in Ponytail’s eyes.
Okay, you win. Kate seethed as the boat sped away. You wanted me, you got me, you bastards, I’m yours. She could no longer just stand by.
If they’d managed to find her, they could locate her family. Her mother knew something about why her father had disappeared. Why he was in that picture. The truth about their lives. They could be in danger.
Kate knew, even as Greg hugged her, what she had to do.
The WITSEC agents wouldn’t help her get to them.
It was up to her to find her family now.
The doctor gave her some Valium, and Kate slept for a couple of hours back at the apartment. Before he left, Greg knelt by the bed and stroked her hair.
“There’s an agent at the door, and the police are outside. Even better, Fergie’s on guard.”
“Good.” Kate smiled sleepily and squeezed his hand.
“You’ve got to be careful, Kate. I love you. I can’t even think about what might have happened. I’ll be back early. I promise.”
Nodding, her lids weighted, Kate closed her eyes.
She awoke in the middle of the afternoon. She still felt a little woozy and shaken, but otherwise she was fine. There was a bandage wrapped around her left arm. She glanced outside the window and spotted an FBI man and a couple of police uniforms on the street below. There was also a guard stationed on her floor, outside the apartment.
It wouldn’t be easy to go about this, Kate realized. She couldn’t e-mail them. She couldn’t call. The agents weren’t about to let her out of their sight now.
Where the hell did she even begin?
In the bottom drawer of her desk was the accordion folder she kept filled with the old e-mails and correspondence she had received from them throughout the past year. Kate had never destroyed them, as she’d been instructed. These messages and cards were all she had. She’d read them over several times.
There had to be something in there. Somewhere …
She put a Bartók string quartet on the external iPod and began leafing through them. Truth was, she’d always had a few ideas. Justin once wrote that they had a dock on their property and they could get around by boat, which he thought was cool. Mom wrote that the winter wasn’t too bad at all—that mostly it just rained a lot. Maybe Northern California, Kate always surmised. Or the Northwest coast. Even if her hunches were right about that, it was still a huge amount of territory.
She didn’t even know their new name.
Page by page, she pieced through the stack of correspondence. At first it was pretty much just “miss you” notes and a lot of complaints. Things weren’t the same where they were. Nothing was like before. Justin was finding it hard to meet new friends. Em was mostly miffed about Dad and new squash coaches who weren’t as good.
Mom just seemed depressed. “You don’t know how much we all miss you, darling.”
Then, over the year, the messages got a little brighter.
