DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (15 page)

Bostrom’s pickup was fast, a V-8, fuel-injected engine combusting under a gleaming red hood that rammed through the air, but when the first Sheriff’s Department SUV came blasting through an intersection and swerved in right behind them, Jennifer was scared.

She gripped the armrest, her feet firmly planted on the floor. She glanced through the windshield at the sky.

“We’re going to draw lots of attention.” She was thinking helicopters. Police or FBI. News choppers. She was picturing the various events over the years with people on the run, dozens or hundreds of police on their tails as the media spied from above. Good God, was she going to be one of those stories? What was she doing? How had everything gotten so turned around?

“In less than twenty-four hours, no one will be paying any attention,” Bostrom said.

She looked at the county cop in the side-view mirror. The vehicle was right on their tail. “What’s going to happen in twenty-four hours?”

Bostrom gave her a quick look, and then pinned the road with his eyes again as they headed around a steep curve.

“You’ve got to think like the military; it’s all chain of command, it’s the careers of the people involved. Someone like Argon didn’t want any of that bureaucratic bullshit hanging over him. Ever wonder why he stayed a beat cop for his entire career? He used the street to hold court.”

She kept watch on the mirror. They were out in the sticks, with nothing but cornfields, barns, and telephone poles on long flat roads, glistening like silver ribbons in the rain. The sun was buried behind the dark gray clouds, making the siren lights stand out extra brightly. They had picked up another pursuer. Not an SUV, but a fast-looking county cruiser.

“Argon was right on top of it,” Bostrom said. “And his sister was, too.”

“Philomena?” She turned away from the side-view mirror, momentarily shocked out of her fear.

“Philomena Argon was recruited by the IMF. She was repatriated here. She brought her younger brother with her. Their parents were dead and gone.”

Jennifer felt like a grenade had detonated in the reaches of her mind. Largo had told her that Argon had been in possession of damning information — data that could expose more political and corporate corruption than any recorded 911 phone call could. Now Bostrom was telling her where he’d gotten it from. Not only that, but the former head of the IMF had recently been in New York City. He’d been arrested and sent to Rikers. Now released, he’d been in there with Brendan for a time. She was sure of it.

“Mena stayed in DC for years while Seamus moved north to Westchester County,” Bostrom said, his forearms bulging as he manhandled the wheel. “But after a stroke forced her retirement, he had her move to Dobbs Ferry to keep her nearby.”

She was still reeling from the information. “What did she do? What department was she in?”

“Communications. Editorial and publications, plus internal.”

Her mind spun with the possibilities. They were coming up hard behind a smaller pickup, taking it’s time. Bostrom swung his big truck out and around the other, passing them almost as if they were standing still. The cops on their tail followed suit.

“Better grab the holy-shit bars for this one.”

Jennifer reached up and took the handle above the door as Bostrom urged the pickup to a higher and more dangerous speed. The cops receded in the mirror, but only a little. The whole frame of the truck vibrated over the rough county road. “Philomena studied macroeconomics at Oxford. When she started working for the IMF, she was under-challenged. Her mind was always working. She watched the flow of money into the Fund — the IMF — and where it was coming from, and where else it was going. She had a heart doctor in Westchester County. Gerard Healy. She didn’t just pick him at random. She’d seen his name half a dozen times working at the Fund.”

Jennifer quickly added what Bostrom was saying to her own knowledge. “Gerard Healy sat on various boards and committees with Alexander Heilshorn . . . including one called ‘The Foundation.’”

Bostrom suddenly threw on the brakes, and Jennifer lurched forward, the seatbelt strap cutting into her chest. “That’s exactly right,” Bostrom said. He spun the wheel hard left, gunned the engine, and the big truck leapt onto a side road, a dirt road. They rocketed towards a line of trees. Jennifer hung on for her life. “Opinion makers,” he said. “Heilshorn was on that committee. Advising about medical technology, about the internet, digital currency like bitcoin.”

Bitcoin
, she registered. It was how she had found a credible link between Heilshorn and Nonsystem.

“Philomena was cultivating Gerard Healy, as an asset. Remember this is a woman from a military family, civic duty imbued in her. Probably would’ve been CIA if she’d been a natural-born citizen.”

“That’s how Argon came to know that Alexander Heilshorn had a daughter going to school up here,” she said, fitting it together now, staring ahead at the dense woods. They were driving towards it, full speed. “Because Gerard Healy knew?”

Bostrom nodded. “When Rebecca was murdered, Argon came up and met with all of us — myself, Stemp, and his buddy Taber. Taber kept an eye on things, but Taber was under Heilshorn’s control. Argon had essentially put Brendan Healy in place. Like a chess piece.”

Brendan Healy: Gerard Healy’s only child. In the middle of the maelstrom, just like she’d thought. Only now she knew how, and why. Because Argon and Taber had been friends. Argon had been onto XList from the beginning, and he’d sent Brendan up here because Argon had suspected how Heilshorn had trapped Assemblyman Largo.

But that meant Brendan had been manipulated. His wife and daughter had been killed to satisfy Heilshorn’s vengeance. He’d escaped attempts on his life, he’d spent half a year in prison. He was at the center of this whole thing, and it was because he’d been put there. And now he was fighting his way free.

He tried to lose himself in the rush of the streets, the cabs frenetically jockeying through the traffic, the buses with blasts of exhaust fumes as they passed, the urine stink hissing up through the subway grates. Skirting the sidewalk plane trees and pin oaks in their little squares of soil, as he walked. And the people, exhausted, leaning forward, or listing to the side, or arched back with a laugh, the chaotic patterns as they weaved over the cement. Everything individual and collective at once. Large plate glass windows to the laundries, the dry-cleaners, the electronics stores, the cheap clothing stores, the doors wedged open to sticky yellow light, every third with Freon refrigerating the overweight tourists, scratchy
sarod
music playing from tinny speakers. The racks on the sidewalks and the tables with sunglasses and hats and bootleg DVDs. The hot, baking air, industrial air, like the whole place was a sweatshop, but it was okay.

The mercy of being out of that prison hell. The freedom. Nothing better than freedom. Nothing on earth. Brendan really felt like he could kiss the streets. They said no matter what, you had everything if you had your health. But healthy prisoners would beg to differ.

He couldn’t sit in the hotel room. He’d tried. He’d checked in, taken a long hot shower, put on the TV, and promptly felt like an alien. There was a mini-bar in the room. He opened the door to the small fridge and crouched in front of it, staring in at the candy-colored liquors. He could taste the polish of the bourbon on his tongue, smell the sting of the vodka in his nostrils. He imaged the bitter taste of Heineken sliding down his throat, cutting through an unquenchable thirst.

He left the room, and went downstairs. He asked at the front desk if he could change rooms to one that was devoid of alcohol. The waifish, middle-aged clerk behind the counter betrayed a curious look he quickly quashed beneath cheery helpfulness. Of course he could have another room. Right
away
he could have another room.
Let me just check and see if one is available and then maybe you’ll actually be able to go to that other room right
now
.

As the staff busied themselves with the room change, Brendan left the hotel. He ended up walking for two hours and made three calls from three different phone booths. From the first payphone he found, he called the 914 number he had for Sloane, the one his lawyer had given him, the number for her adoptive parents. She wasn’t in, but they promised to pass on his message. He told them where he was staying, including the original room number he’d been assigned.

He wandered, down Fifth Avenue, up Broadway as it cut over the other avenues, back down to Central Park, through it to Columbus Circle, back towards Seventh Avenue, then on the subway south to the Village. Third Street, Sullivan, McDougal, a bar called Duffy’s, the jangle of music and clack of pool balls drifting up and out, the sylphlike shapes of the men curled around their drinks, the bright and intoxicated laughter of a woman.

He kept walking. No rhyme or reason to his direction, total autonomy, deciding he would keep moving until his legs were burning, a zigzagging path through a city grid.

At last, he noticed the two people following him.

A man and a woman. The woman he’d first noticed uptown, and then he’d seen her again in the reflection of a window back along Third Street. The man appeared as Brendan rounded Third onto Sixth Avenue and descended back down to the subway. The man came down after him, and Brendan was sure he’d sighted him, too, this time by Central Park, that same crewcut, the same gait, the same way one shoulder sagged slightly below the other. Dressed in civilian clothes which didn’t fit right. A style that didn’t match his haircut. The woman, too, with a low-cut blouse exposing her clothes-hanger collar bone, dangly earrings. Something wrong about both their appearances.

The 4 train rattled and squealed into place and he stepped on and watched as the faces flurry past, and he saw the crewcut man in the too-obvious hipster clothes and for a fraction of a second they locked eyes before the world outside the scarred subway window became black with the inside of a tunnel.

Her phone rang. It seemed like the most bizarre thing. As she stared out the windshield, as Bostrom drove down a series of trails so off-road that some of them were just two grooves in the grass, roads he clearly knew well, and as the Sheriff’s Department disappeared from their tail, the idea of her phone ringing was absurd. Phones rang when you were sitting at your desk, or walking down the street.

“Hi, John,” she said, putting it to her ear.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rascher sounded furious and afraid at the same time.

She glanced at Bostrom. “I’ve gotten more information this afternoon than in the past seven months.”

“Jennifer, this is insane.”

“I agree.”

Rascher didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t used to this. She felt a perverse twinge of pride. No, he wasn’t used to it at all. He was used to her being tractable. But that had started to end the day she was taken up into a skyscraper and poisoned. And what little remained of her pliancy, was circling the drain now after watching cops shoot members of her security detail, turn a weapon on a defenseless woman, and have her supervisor dismiss a possible 911 record of it all.

Bostrom gave her a quick glance. They bounced down the old logging roads, at times so hard she was lifted right up out of her seat. If it hadn’t been such a dire situation, it might’ve even been fun.

“I’ve gotta go, John,” she said, and ended the call. Then she lowered the window, and threw her phone out into a blur of pine needles. Bostrom glanced over again.

“I hunt out here,” he explained after a moment. “Some of the other guys know this area. A few. But I think we’re going to be in the clear.”

True to his words, a few minutes later they emerged from the woods and were on a dirt road alongside an old cow pasture. There were two large boulders and a grove of small fir trees, huddled together like an oasis. They came to the end of the dirt way and the truck jumped onto the hard surface of a more major route where Bostrom cut a right turn. They got up to speed and were on their way again. No cops in sight, no one behind them. And nothing above.

“Bostrom?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you taking me?”

He piloted the big truck along at a sane speed of sixty miles an hour. The road was wet from the afternoon storm, the puddles evaporating, a mist in the air.

“Alexander Heilshorn saw multiple opportunities in XList,” Bostrom said.

She took one of the water bottles he had stashed in his duffel bag and drank. “Such as?”

“Prostitutes gathering information, prostitutes causing scandals, even prostitutes committing murder.” Bostrom raised his eyebrows. “You made it your career to investigate this stuff.”

“I did and I didn’t. I’m interested in the common denominator. In big black market busts, it’s always the money that leads to the big players, never the product. That’s what you follow. And, occasionally, you see that money go to the top, somewhere it really shouldn’t. But when that happens, you’re dealing with something dangerous; you have to tread very carefully.”

Bostrom nodded. She sounded like she was convincing herself as much as him.

Jennifer amended, “But, in the end, it’s about the people. The women involved, the children involved. You’re right. That’s my job.”

“Argon was worried about them, too. I think baby Sloane triggered that for him, for sure. Really brought it home. As I’m sure you know, the more the FBI has been coming after black markets, organizations like XList go deeper underground.”

They took an on-ramp and merged with the flow of traffic on an interstate. Jennifer was about to question the use of a major route, but Bostrom spoke first. “Plus, you have the money side, like you said. Only, bitcoin gets hacked, people lose millions, bitcoin gets tracked, people get arrested, what happens? That goes deeper, too. The way of transacting business online goes into total stealth mode.”

Nonsystem
, she thought. Hackers. People managing newer and more sophisticated ways to conceal the path of the money — the path which so often led to the answers. But who was Nonsystem? Libertarians paving the way for more ways to purchase drugs, guns, and humans outside the spotlight of government? If that was all there was to them, theirs was a dark crusade.

“The authorities make busts,” Bostrom said, driving, “and you’ve got people who’ve invested millions into these black markets, and then are taken down. Drug kingpins arrested, accused of running illicit online businesses worth billions.”

She ran a shaky hand through her still-wet hair and took a deep breath. “You’re taking me to meet them.”

“Philomena had compiled one of the most comprehensive lists of corruption, money-laundering, bribery, and black market scheming. A civilian’s NSA, turned on the government. Seamus knew he had something valuable, but what do you do with that? He was either going to get it into the right hands, or he was just going to take things into his
own
hands when the time was right.” He gave her a quick glance. “Yes, I am taking you to meet a few people in the Nonsystem group.”

She felt excited and fearful at the same time, a paradoxical mixture that cycled through her system, jittering her nerves. “When Argon visited Brendan Healy in the middle of the Heilshorn investigation, he didn’t tell him any of this? Why?”

“That’s when I met Argon. That same time. Argon knew Brendan was being watched — figured he could’ve been bugged. So he was cautious. Plus, Heilshorn stayed deep behind the curtain until Rebecca’s murder. That’s when it all started to come out.”

“How and why did Heilshorn push his business into this region? Proximity to Albany?”

“That’s part of it. Here’s the other: there’s heat on XList in the beginning, the Feds are too close. There are a couple of busts, nothing that ties Heilshorn to XList, but they lose some of the girls. They need fresh recruits. So, Lawrence Taber is the key.”

Taber
, she thought. “You know about Taber and—?”

“Sloane, yes. Argon told me. Not that it’s public information, far from it. Heilshorn has been using it against Taber for years, using it to manipulate the man and his department once XList moved into the region.”

Jennifer was familiar with parts of the background story. She’d shared it with fifty people in the Robert F. Kennedy building just a few mornings previously, before Rascher had picked her up and this whole thing had started going crazy. Argon and Taber had been friends as young men — Argon the older and more cynical one. Taber had made the mistake of falling for a girl who was trying to escape her pimp, a man named Jerry Brown. Brown had big plans, and he’d just gotten in with a financial backer willing to give his organization the cash to expand, but to also provide a very unorthodox service — Heilshorn would become the in-house obstetrician. It made even more sense now, darker sense; everything with the girls would be controlled, including pregnancies.

The whole thing had been sparked by a young woman Taber had become smitten with: Lana Mazursky, a Russian immigrant inducted into the sex trade by Jerry Brown. She and Taber were Sloane’s biological parents. Argon had tried to help Taber, to find Lana when she went missing, but he’d ended up getting to her too late. He’d found her giving birth to the baby in an alleyway in a derelict section of the city. An intentional baby, a pregnancy she’d wanted with Taber, nearly destroyed by Jerry Brown, who’d tried to abort it with his fists.

Taber hadn’t known, not for years. Argon had kept it from him. Taber was on his way to do good things, he’d already met someone new. But Alexander Heilshorn had known; it was what had given him the idea for XList. And when the time came to infiltrate Albany, he’d blackmailed Lawrence Taber with Sloane.

Sloane Dewan had been the birth of an idea for Heilshorn. A way of doing business, of ensuring his investments, using humans as collateral.

“Rebecca was really the beta phase,” Bostrom said. “The Heilshorns are a twisted family. Probably she’d been abused growing up. Heilshorn sets her on Philip Largo when the assemblyman finds out about the data center. After that, Rebecca gets in deeper. But, willingly. Almost like an act of defiance. If she can’t get out, she’ll make an even bigger mess of things, who knows? Maybe she liked it, too. Eventually Reginald Forrester is called in to handle it, to put a scare on her. But Jane . . . Olivia Jane took it the extra step. I was the OSO on the murder.”

“And now you’re the one telling me all of this. Would you be willing to testify?”

“Testify?” Bostrom tossed her another look. Then he patted his sidearm. “That’s the only testifying I’m gonna do.”

She allowed the macho talk to stand for now, but all this bluster about Wild West justice — that was where she took issue, she realized. That was her sticking point. “Alright. Tell me why Gerard Healy trusted Philomena enough to furnish her with what he had on Heilshorn.”

“She didn’t ask. The woman was born to be a spy, I’m telling you. She raided Gerard’s laptop, copied the hard drive.”

“And?”

“Gerard had published a paper on processed foods causing inflammation of the arteries, for one. It flew in the face of the popular opinion that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. That this is just money-making BS from the opinion-makers in bed with Big Agribusiness and Big Pharma who want to sell low-fat food and pills. His paper gets some reactions, stakeholders in companies who have been highly profitable for years making money off human disease. And it gets him booted from The Foundation which is advising private equity firms and multinational corporations on things related to medicine and technology, like you said.”

“So he’s upset? What? Wants to get back at them?”

“He’s just a freedom fighter. I mean, Gerard Healy is a sophisticated guy, you know, liked his wine, spoke a couple languages, but a rebel at heart. They pushed him out so he started an anti-Foundation campaign, talking about how the government is run by corporations. Specifically, Titan’s relationship to the government.”

“Then he succumbs to a grand mal seizure.”

Bostrom looked over at her as he slowed the car at a red light. “That’s right. Titan is flexing its power.”

“Can you prove they’re responsible?”

He shook his head. “It’s not until years later, not until Rebecca’s murder, that Argon makes the connection. He starts to put it together at the same time Brendan Healy is working the case, like I said. I mean, Healy’s the reason we’re talking right now.”

She scowled and peered out into the rain. “Right, because when Argon died, it drew Healy back in. The whole thing comes full circle.”

“Taber really lassoed him.”

Taber
, she thought.
On permanent vacation.

And:
They’re all dead and buried somewhere.

Jennifer took another deep breath. She glanced in the side-view mirror and saw headlights coming up behind fast them. It made her heart jump, until she realized it was a civilian vehicle, jockeying for position on the interstate. Traffic was thickening now as they drove southeast, towards more populated areas, and commuters headed home from a day at the office. The storm was moving off ahead of them. It felt like they were chasing it.

“Does Philomena still have the data?”

“No. We do.”

“Where are we going, exactly?”

He wore a skeptical expression.

“Come on,” she said. “I threw my phone out the window for God’s sake. You can trust me.”

His mouth twitched into a smile. “Cape Cod,” he said.