Invasive Species (25 page)

“Jack, I don't have time for this,” Summers said.

But Jack did. “And know what else? Trey and me, we saw it right away. But you had to pretend that we were idiot conspiracy theorists, but now that your boss is being hit with a pile of—”

“Fuck you, Parker.” Summers's tone was venomous. “First of all, he's not my boss—I'm career here, you know that. Second, fuck you anyway.”

Jack was grinning. “Very nice. I'll do anything you ask now.”

“We need you to come in. Right away.”

“Oh, now you want me? Well, fuck you, too.”

“Could you put a lid on it for, like, two seconds, and just listen?”

Jack grinned, but kept quiet. When Summers spoke again, his tone had changed. “You know this is a shitstorm,” he said, “and we need your help.”

Some of the pleasure drained from Jack's expression. “I don't know, George. I saw the
Bourne
movies. ‘Coming in' isn't always such a hot idea.”

“We need to know what you know. You're doing nobody any good sitting in your little office in that big stone building filled with rocks and old bones.”

Again, a pause and a change in tone. “I mean it. We want to hear what you have to tell us.”

Jack moved his mouth around, as if testing arguments, but in the end he just sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Say I say yes, what do I do?”

“How fast can you get out to LaGuardia? We have a plane waiting for you.”

“Wow.” Jack's eyes widened. “You sure know how to woo a boy. Let me just go back to my place for my clothes—”

“We'll buy you some when you get here.”

“And I have to tell the museum.”

“We already did that.”

Jack scowled. “Let me just check with—”

“No,” Summers said.

“What?”

“Not your friends. Just you. You're the expert.”

Jack said, “You're wrong about that. They know things I—”

“Just you,” Summers said again. “Those are my orders, and that's the way it has to be.”

Jack looked at Trey. Now he just looked weary.

“You know that part of the movie where someone says, ‘You're making a big mistake'?” he said. “Well, we've reached that point. You're making a big mistake.”

They heard Summers make a sound. It was probably a laugh.

“I wouldn't bet against it,” he said.

*   *   *

FRESHLY SHOWERED BUT
his hair still a mess, Jack watched the TV as he got dressed.

“Call when you can,” Trey told him.

“Sure, if they don't bump me off as soon as they pump me for everything I know.”

It came out sounding like a joke, but Trey didn't think he was kidding. Those
Bourne
movies must have made a strong impression.

Jack ran his hands through his hair, then said, “Look, it's that guy again.”

“That guy” being Anthony Harrison's communications director, Jeremy Axelson, whom they'd seen on every network the night before. Somehow he still looked awake, alert, ready to face the new day.

As they watched, he looked straight into the camera and pointed. Jack got the remote and raised the sound.

“One piece of advice for the president and his staff,” Axelson was saying. “You're in deep already. Don't dig yourself any deeper. Don't obfuscate, don't hide, don't destroy. It's not the crime—or not only the crime—it's the cover-up. Whatever you try, it won't work. We'll find out. It's a guarantee.
We'll find out
.”

The doorbell rang. “Your taxi's here,” Trey said.

Jack was still staring at the TV. Then he turned his head and gave them a wide-eyed look.

“Summers is an asshole,” he said, “but he's right about one thing.”

“There's a storm coming,” Sheila said.

For once Jack looked completely serious.

“I don't believe,” he said, “that
any
of them—on either side—has the slightest clue how bad this is going to be.”

Springfield, Vermont

IT WAS THE
same crew as the other time, Harry Solomon realized. Fort Collins. Trent and the two young guys, the ones who knew how to make things burn.

Harry wondered what here in Vermont needed burning.

He wasn't sure he'd gotten over Fort Collins yet. It had left a bad taste in his mouth, and in his brain, too.

At least this time they weren't going to have to carry away any corpses. The chief of staff had assured him of this. Harry doubted the COS's word, but the car left for them in this gravel parking lot beside a long-closed factory was a late-model Subaru Forester. Not big enough for the four of them and a stiff, much less multiple stiffs.

Harry didn't know exactly what their job would be. That was new. Ever since Anthony Harrison had made his first speech about those bugs, the COS—the whole White House—had been in full-on panic mode. Harry, and who knew how many others, had been working double-time, calling in favors—and offering money or threats when favors didn't work—from newspaper reporters, police departments, and the general public, all to keep the story from boiling over.

The panic had led to increased security, which meant Harry now got his orders in stages. Today, for instance, he and the rest of the crew had been told to meet here in Springfield, and then drive the Forester to some house a couple of towns away. There they would learn their ultimate destination and what they were expected to do.

It was a pain in the ass, not knowing in advance, but Harry could see why the COS was crapping bricks. Just a few weeks left till Election Day, and their guy's best chance was to convince the voters that the story was being overhyped by the Harrison campaign.

Harry wasn't so sure he believed it. That the story
was
being overhyped. He'd seen the dead guys in that house, and now he knew what had killed them. A few more attacks, someone filming the wasps chewing the eyeballs out of somebody, and all the bribes and threats in the world weren't going to win Sam Chapman the election.

Harry's phone buzzed. He peered down at the screen: the coordinates of their first stop. Pain in the ass.

He looked back up at his waiting crew. “Let's go.”

*   *   *

HARRY DROVE. THE
GPS guided them west on a small highway, northwest on a smaller one, and then onto a dirt road heading due north. They passed dairy farms with black-and-white cows. A pond with people rowing on it. Cabins set back from the road, surrounded by maples and oaks that were already losing their leaves, and some pines and firs, too.

Then three more turns—east, north, east—and onto a small dirt road marked with No Thru Traffic signs. At the end of this road, in a small clearing at the end of a winding driveway, lay their initial destination.

It was a wooden cabin, hand-built a half century or more ago, now weathered to gray. Harry stopped the car and they got out. Other than the pinging of the cooling engine and the whisper of a breeze through the trees, there was no sound. No human voices, no birdcalls, not even the chirp of crickets.

Later, Harry knew he should have understood what this silence meant, but he didn't. He wasn't paying the right kind of attention.

Instead, he was looking around. He guessed this was someone's hunting or fishing cabin. Not a telephone pole or power line in sight. The kind of place you'd come to
because
there was no phone service.

“I could like it here,” he said.

Beside him, Trent opened his mouth to say something. Whatever it was, it went forever unspoken, because instead of talking he went flying backward. Flung through the air like some huge hand had flicked him away.

His arms spread out as he flew. He had a surprised expression on his face.

As Harry threw himself to the ground, he heard the muffled snap of a silenced .457, sound traveling more slowly than death, as always. Rolling, twisting, getting back to his feet, he hurled himself toward the edge of the clearing, as far as he could from where the bullet had come from.

Knowing exactly what was happening.

More muffled shots. The other two men dead in five seconds: a cutoff cry and the thump of a body hitting the ground, followed by one last crack of a gunshot, another thump. A wet, hopeless moaning.

Just as Harry made it to the edge of the clearing and dove into the brambles that surrounded it, he felt something riffle through his hair. A moment later, he heard the shot that had barely missed him.

He scrambled forward, feeling the thorns scratch his face and pull at his clothes. It was more like swimming than running. With every passing second—and there were too many of them, far too many—he imagined the gunmen approaching to finish their task. He knew,
knew
, they were drawing near, standing there, aiming.

But somehow he made it through the brambles into more open forest. His skin shrinking away from the expected impact of the bullet, he got to his feet. Stumbling, tripping, falling, pulling himself upright, stumbling forward again. So slow. Someone in a wheelchair could catch him. How could he outrun a bullet?

Fighting for breath, half blind, he didn't see the stone wall snaking through the forest until he nearly fell over it. Stopped in his tracks, he raised his head and saw, perched atop the wall a few feet away, a little girl.

No more than six, she was dressed in blue denim overalls and a pink-and-white-checked shirt. A beam of sun made it down through the canopy and glinted off her blond hair.

“Run!” Harry yelled. Or rather, gasped. Thinking only of what a .457 round would do to her.

She stared at him, mouth open, not moving. Almost immediately, she was joined by three other people: a boy of about nine and an adult man and woman, all standing on the other side of the wall. They were wearing denim and flannel and carrying colorful daypacks. The man held a walking stick.

A young family hiking through the Vermont woods, coming upon this wild-eyed old guy with torn clothes and scratched-up face.

But they didn't run away, as Harry had thought they would. They didn't leave him alone again in the woods. Instead, as he came up to the wall and half climbed, half fell over it, they clustered around him, helping him to his feet, brushing him off, their voices sounding like birdcalls in his ears.

The people pursuing him were still there. He knew it. Right now they had their weapons trained on him, on all of them, as they decided what to do next. Harry's only chance was that they hadn't been cleared to take out any other targets or to kill in front of witnesses.

Maybe, at this moment, the chief of staff was deciding whether Harry—and this innocent family—would live or die.

Maybe it was the president himself making the decision.

The family was staring at him, all four of them. He knew he had to answer their questions, had to say something. But what? What? He'd never been in this position before. He'd never been the prey.

Finally he came out with, “Someone in the woods. A hunter. Took a shot at me. More than one shot.”

The boy and little girl seemed to think this was pretty exciting news, worth investigating further. But the mom gasped and put her hand to her mouth, and the man dropped his walking stick and swept his daughter off the stone wall and into his arms.

“Come on,” he said to his reluctant son. “Let's go. Now!”

After taking a few steps, the woman looked over her shoulder. “Come with us,” she said.

A nice lady. She had no idea that if Harry went with them, the threat of death came, too.

*   *   *

THEY MOVED THROUGH
the woods for fifteen minutes. The father tried and failed repeatedly to get cell-phone service. Harry found himself noticing the golden and orange leaves spinning to the ground in gusts of wind, the sun gleaming on dew-soaked spiderwebs, a white-tailed deer stopping to stare at them before trotting away, its tail lifted in warning.

He began to understand that the gunmen weren't going to kill him. Not here, not now.

The forest thinned. They climbed over another stone wall and reached a road, a different one than Harry and his doomed crew had arrived on. Dirt, but graded and graveled, with SUVs and a scattering of cars parked along the edges. On the other side of the road a small lake glinted in the sun. A Volvo with a pair of kayaks on its roof came down the road, slowed, and turned onto a muddy track that led down to the lakeshore.

The father was on his phone, presumably with the police, reporting the presence of a dangerous hunter in the woods. When he finished the call, he turned his eyes on Harry. The man wanted to be rid of him, it was obvious, but he only said, “Did you park along here?”

Harry shook his head. “No—my car's back in there, near where you found me.” He widened his eyes. “I'm not going back for it, not yet, no way.”

The father frowned, but couldn't argue with this. “You have someone you can call? Who can rescue you?”

Rescue you.
Harry almost laughed. “Sure.”

Then he patted at his pockets. “Oh, hell,” he said. “My phone's back with my stuff.”

Gone, along with everything else his team had brought. His team itself. Their bodies long gone by now. By the time the police arrived, there would be no sign he and his men had ever been there.

No, that wasn't true. An expert forensic team would surely be able to find evidence that people had been shot there, but who was going to call out a forensic team after a report of some hunter mistaking a hiker for a deer? The cleanup would be good enough to fool the forest ranger or low-level badge the state of Vermont would send to check out the scene.

“Listen,” Harry said, “is there any chance you could give me a ride to someplace with a phone?”

Thinking,
Someplace with lots of other people around.

The man frowned again and exchanged glances with his wife.

“Don't worry about it,” Harry said, starting to turn away. “I can walk or hitchhike.”

But the wife was shaking her head. “Of course we'll take you,” she said, smiling. “We can't abandon you here after you almost got shot. We're going to Ludlow. Is that okay?”

“That's just fine,” Harry said.

He had no idea where Ludlow was, but it didn't matter.

Anyplace was better than here.

*   *   *

LUDLOW WAS CARS,
cafés, art galleries, a ski mountain gearing up for the season, and hordes and hordes of leaf-peepers wandering around.

Perfect.

Thank God for Vermont, Harry thought. All these tourists, and still old-fashioned enough to have a line of pay phones outside a supermarket. Someone had even scratched
Worship God
on the silver coin boxes, just like they used to do in New York City back when there were pay phones everywhere.

Harry had memorized the number he was about to call. He'd been thinking about using it for days, ever since Anthony Harrison had given that speech. Telling Axelson about the stiffs, about the secret lab that had been operating all those weeks ago. Showing him the card he'd had found, the one that said,
Philanthus???

Proving that Anthony Harrison was right: The president's men had known about the bugs for weeks or months and hadn't told anybody.

Of course, back then Harry had been interested in the financial side of things. He'd thought his information would be worth a fortune.

Now it was all about survival.

He dialed the number. It went to voice mail, a calm voice saying merely, “Axelson.”

When the beep came, Harry said, “My name is Harry Solomon. You know who I am. I got something to tell you you'll want to hear. Call me within ten.”

He read out the number, then hung up and stood there. Years ago, you had to guard your pay phone from all the other people who needed to use it, but no longer. Now half the crowd milling past were stuck to their cell phones, the rest patting their pockets to make sure theirs were still there.

He didn't think the COS's men would kill him in public, not now. But he knew they'd have no qualms about muscling him into a car, driving him away, and making sure no one ever saw him again.

It was just a matter of time.

Call me back, you bastard,
he thought.

The phone rang.