Arctic Fire (35 page)

“I feel bad, Bill. I’m going in and check on Cheryl one more time. I’ll be right back.”

“OK.”

Bill watched Rita trot back toward the mansion. As soon as she disappeared inside, he reached across the front of the Mercedes for her purse, which was sitting on the passenger seat.

He found her cell phone right away and scrolled through her saved numbers. There were no names attached to the numbers he quickly focused on, just unrelated letters as identifiers. But he recognized the digits anyway. One was Jack’s cell phone and the
other was the landline at Lisa’s apartment. He knew because he’d dialed both numbers very recently.

Panic tore through Bill’s system. He couldn’t believe it. Rita Hayes was a spy. She’d gotten these numbers from his cell phone, which she always had access to for business reasons. It was the only explanation.

He’d known Jack was in danger. Now he knew Lisa was too.

J
ACK FINISHED
the last sentence, then placed the paper carefully down on the stack of pages he’d already read. The stack rose from inside the black box, which was sitting in front of him on the desk of the Missoula, Montana, motel room.

The story Troy had written on the pages was astonishing, almost unbelievable, really. It centered on a man named Shane Maddux…and another man named Roger Carlson…who seemed almost like mythic characters to Jack. Troy had basically told the story of Red Cell Seven.

After he’d placed the last page carefully back in the box, Jack lifted his hands in front of his face and stared at them. They were shaking like mad, and he couldn’t make them stop.

Troy had been specific about dates and times and people other than Maddux and Carlson who were also involved with RCS. And he’d been specific about why he believed his direct
superior was clinically insane by listing the reasons that provided absolute proof.

First, Maddux was going to assassinate President Dorn because he believed that Dorn intended to destroy Red Cell Seven.

Second, Maddux was going to create another horrific 9/11-type disaster by detonating an LNG tanker in Boston Harbor. He was going to blow the ship up to throw the country into chaos. So the United States intelligence infrastructure could gain broader spying and interrogation powers on citizens at home and abroad.

Last, Maddux was routinely carrying out vigilante justice. He was murdering people in cold blood who he and Carlson believed had wrongly escaped criminal justice. People who’d been released from prison or jail on technicalities, even people who’d been found innocent by juries but who Maddux and Carlson still believed were guilty. And they were killing anyone who the CIA believed might be spying on the United States. In some cases, people who the CIA didn’t really have much tangible evidence against.

What
really
frightened Jack was that Troy had emphasized over and over in those pages how dedicated
and
incredibly capable Shane Maddux and Roger Carlson were. How almost nothing could stop them.

“So what do you think?”

Jack turned around as Karen sat down on the queen-size bed closest to the bathroom. She had only a towel wrapped around her slender body, and she looked sexy with her dark, wet hair hanging down on her slim shoulders. But he barely noticed how beautiful she looked. He was still so blown away by what he’d read.

“I think it’s incredible.”

Karen had read the material during the drive through North Dakota, but Jack had waited until he could concentrate completely on the pages. He’d gone through the single-spaced saga while Karen had taken a long, hot bath, and now he was glad he’d
waited and that he’d asked her not to tell him anything about it. He would have been so distracted he might have run off the road and killed them both.

“I think we’ve basically got a time bomb on our hands.”

“And
I
think it’s as dangerous to us as it is to the entire intelligence network of the United States.”

“Exactly,” Jack agreed. He moved to the other queen-size bed and sat down on it so he was facing her. “If this got into the wrong hands, it would compromise the lives of so many individuals, and that could mean a lot of damn trouble for us. It’s so specific about places and dates and people.”

Karen nodded at the box. “Why would Troy write that?”

“He must have thought he was in trouble,” Jack answered. “And he must have been really pissed off about it. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Troy was too much of a patriot. He was too damn dedicated to this country.”

“He didn’t send it to anyone,” she pointed out. “He just wrote it. Maybe that was enough for him.”

“Maybe.” It seemed logical to assume that Troy hadn’t sent the information to anyone. Why would he have taken the time to hide the box in the cabin and then send the letter to Karen?

“Do we call someone?” she asked.

Now Jack understood what Karen had gone through when she’d gotten Troy’s letter. Who exactly were they supposed to call? If they gave all of this information to someone, they might never find out what had happened to Troy. Worse, they might become targets themselves. In fact, they almost certainly would, Jack realized. Even if they somehow got the information to the right people—whoever the “right” people were—it was logical to believe that the wrong people would ultimately find out what had happened. Presumably, those were people who knew how to kill very effectively and were comfortable taking that step to solve a problem or satisfy their desires for revenge—based on what Troy
had written, anyway. And those weren’t the kind of people Jack wanted to piss off, even if President Dorn’s life was hanging in the balance. It sounded selfish, but after reading Troy’s story, Jack had no desire to get into it with anyone from Red Cell Seven, no matter what was at stake.

“Do we at least call someone about Shane Maddux going for the president?” Karen asked.

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel like we’d be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives if we did.”

She nodded. “That’s exactly what I thought after I read Troy’s letter.”

“Yeah, I get it now.” He shook his head. “What’s amazing is that Maddux and Carlson think what they’re doing is right.”

“Maybe some of it is,” she said after a few moments.

Jack looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was just thinking. What if you and I were married and some animal raped and murdered me. Would you want him to go free because of some stupid technicality? You know, like the cops not reading him his Miranda rights or evidence being collected the wrong way? Which, I’m here to tell you as an-ex cop, happens all the time.”

It was incredible that she’d just alluded to them being married, even if it was in a hypothetical situation. He’d actually thought about it during the drive today, and he’d been forced to admit to himself that he was totally into her. She was the woman he’d been waiting for. He knew that for certain. It seemed crazy for him to fall for her so fast, but maybe that was the crazy part about love. Maybe you knew right away because it was so right.

He glanced away from her and back toward the black box. He just wished she hadn’t made that crack about Troy being so much better looking than him as they were getting on I-94 back in Minnesota this morning. It was stupid, but it was still haunting him.

“Of course, I wouldn’t want that,” he admitted.

“But if he did,” Karen said, “wouldn’t you want justice for me?”

“Sure I would. I’d do everything I could to get him another trial.”

“What if that didn’t work?”

He knew where she was going with this. “I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t you want to get justice for me any way you could?”

“You mean—”

“
Yeah
,” she said emphatically. “Wouldn’t you want Red Cell Seven’s help?” She started ticking the facts off on her fingers. “You have irrefutable evidence, you have his confession to the cops, and you have him laughing to the press about it when he gets wrongly released. He’s guilty, but he beat the rap and he’s having fun with it.” She hesitated. “Wouldn’t you want Shane Maddux and Roger Carlson on your side?”

Jack took a deep breath. “But can that really ever be the right way to get justice, Karen? It’s wrong to ignore the system, it’s completely wrong. And you know it.”

Karen rolled her eyes. “It’s easy to say that when it hasn’t really happened. But what if it did?”

“I understand.”

Of course, he’d want to tear the guy apart with his bare hands. But agreeing with her that vigilante justice was acceptable, even in just a single case, would violate one of his most basic beliefs—which was that you had to let the system work and you had to abide by its decision even if you hated it. If not, society disintegrated and mob rule reigned.

“But I can’t agree with you on having some secret government crew getting revenge for us. I just can’t.”

They stared at each other in silence for several moments.

“Let’s go out for a while,” she suggested, changing the subject. “There’s a bar down the street I saw on the way in that looked
pretty cool. Let’s have a few beers and some laughs and try to forget about everything that’s going on for a little while. What do you think?”

“Are you serious?” It was almost midnight and they still had a long way to go. “We should get some sleep. We’ve got another long drive ahead of us tomorrow.”

“Please, Jack. Let’s go out for a little while.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Have I fallen asleep on you in the car?”

“No.”

“And I won’t. I’ll stay right with you all day tomorrow. I’ll do half the driving, and I won’t sleep when I’m not driving. I promise. I know you’re thinking I’ll pass out, but I really won’t. I’m good at that kind of stuff.” She eased down onto the floor, crawled over to where he was sitting, and rested her arms on his thighs so that her face and those beautiful lips were very close to his. “I just want to have some fun. Come on. Please.”

He gazed into those dark eyes of hers. He wasn’t going to turn down that invitation even if he had to keep his eyelids pried open with toothpicks tomorrow.

From the bridge of the massive ship, the man gazed past the huge domes and into the darkness ahead. Then he looked up and cased the sky for any moving lights. But there were none.

The
Pegasus
was only two days from Virginia Beach, and he was getting nervous. He was prepared to die in the inferno they would create when they blew up the ship. But he couldn’t take the thought of being stopped and boarded. He couldn’t take the thought of living out the rest of his life in some awful prison somewhere, tortured every day.

He moaned in a low voice so the other man on the bridge wouldn’t hear him. He wanted all those virgins he’d been promised on the other side. He only hoped that his contact in the United States was as crazy and bitter as he claimed to be.