Switchback Stories by Iain Edward Henn Read Free Book Online

focused on what we’ve found, and this time he’s likely to be found. He’d be exposed to-’
    ‘Nancy,’ Alison cut across her, ‘I won’t be running this story.’
    ‘You won’t?”
    ‘Matthew’s secret will always be safe with me.’

Fourteen
    S ome of the greatest news stories have come from a journalist with a hunch.
    Alison had known her share of those, and this was a hunch that wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t let her sleep, even though it was a story she could never tell.
    She was certain Carpenter wouldn’t risk having further involvement with anti-drug crusading. But he couldn’t stop being the kind of person he was, a man with a passion for helping others.
    She spent weeks researching, under the guise of doing a story on the many and varied people who worked in welfare. She managed to gain access to the employment records from every hospital, school, nursing home, rehab centre and every counselling operation in DC and surrounding States.
    She devoted her own time, evenings, weekends, telling no-one – not even Nancy – of her true intent.
    It was another late night, and the portable TV in the corner of her home study, permanently tuned to the station she worked for, went to a news break that caught her attention.
    ‘…and in news just to hand, after a two year investigation involving undercover police, Federal authorities have indicted Ricardo Guitterez, the multi-millionaire businessman long suspected of being a major narcotics kingpin…’
    Alison reached for the remote and muted the sound. The Guitterez cartel was the one rumoured to be involved in Carpenter’s disappearance.
    Alison turned her attention back to her research. She was half asleep, scrolling through endless columns of data, and she almost missed it. Something sparked in her mind – what had she just seen?
    She scrolled back.
    And there it was.
    Just across the Potomac River from Georgetown. A school for disabled children in Arlington. One of the employees, a 35-year old teaching aide and carer, who’d been employed three years earlier.
    Matthew Carter.
    The Christian name and the initials were the same. He rented an apartment near the school, lived quietly, and was doing an evening course in counselling.
    He’d been involved in approaching the council for increased funding for the school.
    Her intuition screamed out at her that this was him.
    Hiding in plain sight.

Fifteen
    L unch hour, and the kids were out playing in the fenced-in yard, some of them in wheelchairs.
    There was a bluff on the street that approached the school, and Alison sat on the grassy rise, beneath a magnificent old tree and she looked down and across to the yard.
    There were three adult carers in view. Two were women, the third a man that could have been him. The hair was much darker and styled differently and he sported a beard.
    It could have been anyone.
    Alison watched closely. There was something familiar in the man’s mannerisms.
    She was certain it was Matthew Carpenter.
    She wanted to go across, shake his hand, hug him, talk to him about everything that had happened, and about what he was doing now with his life. But she knew that even the slightest contact could potentially one day expose his true identity, subject him to threat from the cartels, force him to run again, and destroy the martyrdom that had built up around the Initiative.
    Damn it, she thought.
    Just one meeting
.
    No one need ever know. She was certain she wasn’t being followed or watched.
    She stood up and at that moment the man in the schoolyard looked up and across, his gaze levelling on her.
    He did not smile or wave or show any form of recognition at all. The distance between them was too great for Alison to see if there was any glint of recognition in his eyes.
    She sensed that there was.
    For what seemed the longest few seconds in her life, Alison looked across at him and he stared back.
    Instinctively, she knew what she had to do. Deep down, she’d always known. As much as