Big Time

by Ben H. Winters

Genres: Coming of Age; Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Ben Winters, whom critics attest  "you'll follow...anywhere" (New York Times Book Review), returns with a speculative, corporate espionage thriller that takes the adage "Time is money," and makes it literally, frighteningly so.
 

What if time could be taken from us—the minutes, the hours, the years of our lives, extracted like organs taken for transplant? What would it mean for the world? And what would it do to the person from whom it’s taken? 

Grace Berney is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Food and Drug Administration, a woman who once brimmed with purpose but somehow turned into a middle-aged single mom with a dull government job and a melancholy sense that life has passed her by. Until the night a strange photo comes across her desk, of a young woman in a hospital bed who has been subjected to a mysterious procedure. Against orders and against common sense, Grace sets out to bring the girl to safety, and finds herself risking her job, her future, and her life on whether she can find the missing girl before an obsessive and violent mercenary who’s also looking. Big Time is a fast-paced thriller and a metaphysical mystery about the very nature of our lives.

Release date: March 5, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second,” Allie called from the back seat.

The driver didn’t answer. The woman had said not one word this entire time, which was part of what was so terrifying about the whole thing. She just drove, not turning around, not answering Allie’s questions, acting like Allie wasn’t even back here. Allie tried to get her to engage, Allie had been trying the whole time, since the moment this lady had grabbed her from the bench at the edge of the playground and forced her across the sidewalk and into the back seat of her silver SUV.

“Hi, could you—I’m sorry, would you just talk to me? Can you look at me? Please.”

Allie tried to stay calm. She was trying to stay calm. It had been—what?—an hour? Two hours? The sun was going down. They were driving south, or at least that’s what Allie thought, she thought they were driving south, she had tried to look for landmarks but the windows were tinted and it was hard to see.

“Can you tell me where we’re going? Can you just—I’m sorry, can you just talk to me?”

The driver—the kidnapper—this strange and terribly quiet and oddly witchy woman—still refused to answer. She just drove, keeping to an even highway speed, no talking, no radio, no sound but the muted rush of the wheels. Allie stared at the back of the woman’s head, at her long black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, at her pale thin neck.

Calm. Allie was working so hard to stay calm. You have to be rational. You can’t panic. You have to stay calm.

“Okay, look. Here’s the thing. Whoever it is that you think I am, I promise you it’s not me. You’ve got the wrong person. Can you—I’m sorry, can you hear me?”

Allie knew it was useless. A waste of words. A waste of time. If this lady, whoever she was, if she was going to respond, if she was going to take pity on her, if she was going to pull over and untie her wrists and apologize for the misunderstanding and let her go, then she would have done it already. Right?

But Allie kept talking. Kept trying. Because, yes, she knew it was useless, but she also knew that if she stopped talking, stopped trying, she would collapse into despair, she would start crying and not stop crying until this lady either killed her or dropped her in a dungeon or threw her in a hole or whatever the hell she was planning.

“Can I just tell you something? Seriously. I’m not rich—okay?—I’m not some, like, heiress or anything like that, if that’s what this is. I’m just a person. I’m just some woman. I’m a teacher.” And as if to prove that she was a teacher, just a regular boring middle-school teacher, Allie was talking in her most pleasant voice, earnest and teacherly, carefully explaining what everyone needed to know for tomorrow’s quiz.

“My name is Allie Zerkofsky. Allison Bridget Zerkofsky. My maiden name is Brownlee—Allison Brownlee. I’m originally from Ohio, and I’m twenty-six years old, and I teach at Dalton Kruger Middle School in Bordentown, New Jersey. I live near there with my husband, Lucas, and—and—”

Allie stopped. She couldn’t think of the baby right now. She couldn’t say the baby’s name. If she said the name out loud, then despair would over-rush her, she knew that it would, and that would be it.

“I teach science and math to sixth- and seventh-graders,” she said instead. “The kids call me Ms. Z. I’m not rich. I’m in debt, actually! I have over forty thousand dollars in outstanding student loans.”

Allie paused. She breathed hopefully. She didn’t know what else to say. Her kidnapper did not seem interested in her student-loan debt.

“I’m wondering if maybe you’ve got me confused with—I don’t know—some kind of drug dealer or—or—or Mafia person?”

Nothing. No answer. Allie’s wrists chafed where they were cinched tightly, one against the other. She felt panic building in the back of her throat.

The driver guided the SUV through a series of turns. It was getting darker outside, but Allie felt like they were still going south, south and west, skirting Philadelphia. She thought she could make out the tops of the bridges that connected New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

What if they were going into the woods? Weren’t there all those hardwood forests in the rural northern part of Maryland, just over the state line? That’s what they do, isn’t it, when they’re going to kill you? Drive you over the state line and into the woods.

Was Allie going to cry again? Was she starting to cry? She moaned softly, tilted her head up, working overtime to keep from crying. Working as hard as she could.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t kill me. Are you going to kill me?”

“I am not,” the driver said, and Allie gasped at the shock of the woman’s voice after the long miles of silence. The voice was cool and flat and uninflected, a voice to match the high black ponytail and the pale thin neck.

“I am not a killer,” the driver continued. “I am a delivery person. I pick up a package and deliver it. Killing and death do not come into it, barring some problem or issue.” The driver looked into the rearview mirror and made quick, grave eye contact with Allie. Her eyes were large and perfectly green, and Allie—insanely, under the circumstances—looked back at her and thought: God, she is gorgeous.

“Is there going to be some problem or issue?”

“No,” said Allie. “No, no, no.”

A delivery person, though, what did that mean? Who could have ordered that Allie be… delivered? She thought again that this had to be one of those horrifying situations you see in the news, some tragic gangland mix-up where regular people are murdered for no reason at all, and you shake your head and go, Those poor people, except now it was Allie, Allie was those poor people.

Lucas was probably getting home from work at this point, going from room to room in their little house on Myrtle Avenue, starting to freak out, calling, “Honey? Hon?” and thinking, Where is she? Where’s the baby?

Oh, no. Oh God. The baby.

Rachel.

At the thought of Rachel, Allie could see her, could smell her, the sweet-soap smell of her scalp. She could feel her tiny wriggling weight.

Allie started to cry.

“Please, ma’am,” she said, her voice a ragged quaver. “Miss. Please. Can you just tell me if the baby’s okay?”

The driver flicked her eyes up to the rearview mirror again and gave Allie a brief questioning glance, but then she looked back at the road without answering. Allie kept talking.

“Her name is Rachel. She’s fourteen months old, and she has this—she drinks a special formula, because she’s got a milk allergy, and—it’s serious, so—” Allie broke off. The thought of Rachel and her formula set her crying again, big hitching sobs she couldn’t hold in.

They had been at the playground on Maslow. Rachel was in the sandbox. The stroller sat parked nearby, with the diaper bag hung on its handles. Allie had taken her shoes off despite the cold because Rachel liked to pack Mommy’s toes in little dunes of muddy sand.

Allie was fully sobbing now, her face hot with tears.

“Oh my God, wait, though, you have to tell him,” she said to the driver. She leaned forward against the seat belt. Her upper arms ached from being tied. Why hadn’t she thought of this already? Why hadn’t it been the first thing she’d said when the lady put her in the car?

“You have to call that man. Please can you just call him?”

“What man?” said the driver sharply.

“The—the man,” stammered Allie. There had been two of them. The woman who had taken Allie and an accomplice, a broad-shouldered man in a gray overcoat and heavy black boots. “The man who took my baby.”

“What baby?” the driver said, and Allie felt a terrible pain erupt from her chest and she cried out. It was like something was gnashing against itself, deep inside of her, close to her heart. Like bone grinding against bone. Startled, Allie jolted in her seat and her head banged hard against the tempered glass of the rear window.

“Hey,” said the driver, and turned in her seat just as Allie fell over sideways, her body locked, her teeth gritted. She was trying to scream but she couldn’t scream, it hurt too much, something was scraping inside of her like a rusted gate. A sound escaped from her in a strangled gurgle.

The driver craned further around, murmuring, “The hell?” just as a deer drifted into the road. She turned back only at the last instant, jerking the wheel hard to the left in time to avoid the animal, sending the SUV skidding off the pavement and colliding at high speed with one of the dark trees that lined the shoulder. The driver was thrown back hard in her seat as the airbag exploded open and slammed into her chest. The hood crumpled and the right headlight shattered and steam came out of the engine in a plume.

Allie was tossed forward and then flung back as the seat belt snapped tight against her chest. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

The grinding internal pain that had erupted inside of Allie receded just as quickly, and now in the stunned silence after the accident she acted without thinking: she slid out from under the seat belt onto the flat carpet of the seat well and inched forward, hands bound, until she could clamp her mouth around the silver door handle and, with an awkward clutch of her teeth, yank it inward, clicking the door open.

Then she pushed forward on the door with the top of her head and tumbled gasping into the roadside mud.

Frantic, Allie stumbled up from her knees onto her feet and lurched into a run, remembering that she had no shoes on only as her foot came down on a thick jagged piece of headlight.

The pain was shocking and intense, and Allie staggered as, from the corner of her eye, she saw her kidnapper pushing open the driver’s side door. Oh God, she thought. Oh no. It was a nightmare. It was a horror movie.

Allie crouched to pull out the shard of headlight just as the driver got to her and grabbed a tight fistful of her hair.

“Come on,” said the woman coldly, but in that instant Allie, with a sickening tug, yanked the piece of headlight from her foot, and then—thinking only of Rachel, only of her daughter’s flashing eyes and fat little body—she straightened up out of her crouch and jammed the bloody glass into the woman’s face, her screams mingling with the startled screams of the driver as Allie drove the shard into her eye.

Allie let go, leaving the broken piece of headlight where she had planted it in the driver’s face.

And then she ran.

Desiree breathed through the pain, calculating how much time this was going to cost her.

That was her name, the striking green-eyed woman in the black pantsuit who had taken Allie from the New Jersey playground: Desiree.

The shard of broken headlight had penetrated deeply into her eye, and the pain was extraordinary, the pain of a sharp, cold, inorganic object embedded in her eyeball.

Desiree wasn’t really her name. In Desiree’s line of work, real names were a liability, and she hadn’t worked under her own in many years. The name Desiree was one she had selected, and it would be discarded at the conclusion of the assignment.

The conclusion of the assignment that would now be delayed. Desiree hated delay. She loathed it. She started the timer on her watch when each new job commenced, and Desiree knew without consulting the watch that she was already over four hours on this one. In a perfect world, a simple delivery such as this would not require more than eight hours in total. This was not a perfect world.

Desiree’s preference would have been to chase the woman through the woods, but this was impossible. Before doing anything else she would have to remove the foreign object from her eye. She would have to seek medical attention. Desiree breathed slowly, in and out. Blood spurted and then dripped and finally merely trickled from her face. Twilight was almost concluded. The roadside was darkening. Time was escaping through the trees.

She had taken her eyes off the road. Turned halfway around in the driver’s seat to look at the girl. Why had she done that?

Desiree knew why: It was the way the girl had screamed. She had said something about a baby and Desiree had said, “What baby?” and then the woman had made this spine-shivering scream, like no scream that Desiree had ever heard. Which, in her line of work, was saying something.

Desiree brought herself up onto her knees, fighting off a wave of nausea and dizziness. She braced herself with one hand flat on the muddy ground. With the other hand, she reached up and took hold of the protruding end of the shard of polycarbonate plastic still stuck in her eyeball and began to pull it out.

The pain, which had begun to subside, intensified. Desiree’s body buckled and shook.

She did not scream. She breathed evenly.

The jagged triangle at last came free, accompanied by a final cascade of blood and vitreous fluid. Her hand still pressed against the ground, Desiree allowed herself one long, muted groan of angry pain.

Then she stood, holding one hand over the wound while her other eye blinked rapidly to adjust to the bleary country darkness. She made her way to the rear door of the SUV and opened it. She squeezed a water bottle to irrigate the wound, then opened her first aid kit. She packed the wound with gauze and then made an X of surgical tape to secure it.

Desiree performed these tasks very quickly, with maximum efficiency. Her every movement was charged with impatience. Every moment she was not chasing the girl was a moment lost. Every moment, Desiree’s search radius got wider.

“Are you all right?”

Desiree turned and saw a young man who had come out of the woods and was behind her, a few feet from the rear of the rented Buick Enclave. Desiree smiled tightly, thinking she had no time for this. The boy was sixteen or seventeen, in athletic shorts and a T-shirt that said PROPERTY OF LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL. A ridiculous jogger’s headlamp was strapped to his forehead.

“I’m fine,” she said, but the teenager stood there gawping.

“Are you sure? Looks like you got in an accident.”

“I’m fine,” said Desiree again, but the boy was shaking his head, his silly headlight bobbing back and forth.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll go and get help.”

He turned to jog away and Desiree pulled the 9-millimeter pistol from the pocket of her coat and shot him one time in the back of the head. He fell directly to the ground, his gangly late-adolescent body collapsing like an accordion beneath the weight of his head.

She stood over him for a moment. A second bullet wasn’t necessary.

Desiree, who was much stronger than her small frame suggested, lifted the jogger into the rear of the Enclave. His eyes stared up at her while she arranged his body in the cargo hold. The headlamp had gone off.

This would take yet more time. Now not only did Desiree need to deal with her eye, she had to swap out this vehicle as soon as possible, before some state trooper pulled her over to ask about the collision damage.

There was a car lot she knew that dealt with these kinds of situations. But it was in Perth Amboy, in the exact opposite direction of where she was supposed to deliver the girl.

Desiree checked the timer on her watch. She had been working this job for four hours, nineteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds. Thirty-three seconds. Thirty-four. Time flying forward, burning itself away.

She had to find that girl, and she would find her. As soon as possible.

Allie crashed haphazardly through the woods until she emerged on a narrow hiking path. She followed this path, taking rapid, terrified breaths, looking back over her shoulder every few yards, running in the darkness even though her body burned from the strain, running and running even as the wound in the sole of her foot cried out each time her foot struck the ground. She paused only long enough to get her hands free, tearing the cloth against the sharp broken end of a jagged branch, and then she continued to run.

The ground was cold. Allie’s whole body was cold. She was lost in the woods in mid-November, and it was so cold.

Allie sternly lectured herself not to panic. “Don’t panic,” she said, and she could hear herself saying it to a roomful of seventh-graders losing their shit about state testing or whatever it was: Don’t panic. Remain calm.

She had to find her way out of here, that was all. She had to find a phone. She had to call Lucas.

He’d be absolutely losing his mind by now. He’d be calling all of their friends, calling her parents.

And what about Rachel?

No, thought Allie fiercely, don’t. Do not. She couldn’t think of Rachel, of her fragile little peanut, wailing and confused, surrounded by strangers, probably soaking wet. No—it was unbearable to think of Rachel, so Allie commanded herself not to do it, to ignore that particular terror and keep going, stay calm and focused and find her way through the forest and to a phone that she could use.

And as all of these thoughts cascaded through Allie’s mind, as she fled through the darkness with her foot pulsing in fiery pain, every once in a while she remembered the terrible grinding sensation that had rolled through her body before, when she was in the back seat and her captor had pretended not to know she had a child.

Thinking back, it had been like pain but not pain exactly. It was more like a kind of pressure exerting itself, a feeling like something dissolving, like something being destroyed. It was strange even to be thinking of it as Allie fled deeper and deeper into the moonlit forest, in the midst of this miserable ordeal—but what on earth could that feeling have been?

Grace Berney had a moment, just a moment but kind of a long one, where she thought she might actually go insane.

Not really, of course. Not literally. She was going to be fine. It wasn’t a big deal.

It was just her mom, just Kathy being her same old Kathy self, just her dear old mother driving her out of her mind, and her dear old mother had been driving her out of her mind for going on forty-six years already. So what was one more night?

Grace took a nice long breath and let it out slow and said, “Hey, Mom? I think maybe you’re making this harder than it needs to be.”

“Everything is harder than it needs to be,” Kathy said tartly. “That’s just called life.”

Or maybe Grace would go insane. Maybe tonight was the night!

Kathy made an agitated little grunt and shifted her soft bulky weight backward into Grace’s arms. Grace dug her heels into the carpet and jammed her hands into her mother’s armpits and succeeded, although just barely, in keeping both of them from toppling over.

“Ach,” said her mom. “That hurts.”

“Sorry,” said Grace. “You okay?”

“I guess.”

“Can we keep going?”

“Well, gimme a damn second. Let me catch my breath.”

Grace’s mother looked a lot like Grace, or at least what Grace was resigned to looking like thirty years and fifty pounds into the future. Grace had heaved Kathy out of her armchair to maneuver her, step by labored step, across the tidy living room of the town house to the bathroom. Now they were paused at the halfway point, directly below the Smithsonian Institution print of wildflowers that hung between the front windows. Grace noticed that the windows were smudged and needed cleaning, even though she had cleaned them maybe three days ago. After s. . .