Midnight Fire (18 page)

Fuck yes. He was getting Summer onto that plane as fast as humanly possible and he was keeping her in Portland, surrounded by the toughest guys he’d ever met, and their super friendly women, until every possible danger was over.

“What?” she whispered. “What about my apartment?”

“Gone. Bombed.” Jack delivered the stark news and watched the blood drain from her face. “I’m so sorry, honey.” He grabbed her hands, holding them tightly. She was shivering with shock. The intrusion, the discovery of sarin, dredging up horrible memories of being so sick in Cartagena, had been bad enough. This was much worse. “They’re looking into it but the truth is—your place is gone.”

“Gone,” she whispered through stiff lips. Fuck. That lost, disoriented look was back. How many blows was one person supposed to handle? “Everything. Gone. All my records, too. Luckily I keep everything in the cloud but now—”

“Now we’re going to Portland,” Jack said firmly. “Where you’ll be safe.”

“
Area 8.
What about
Area 8
? It just dies?”

“You’re going to have to close up shop. I know what that means, believe me. I know how hard you must have worked to create it. But like I said, you have to stay off the grid for now. Whoever is orchestrating this has to think you’re dead. We already talked about this.”

“I am dead.” Her voice was low and flat. “Or close to it.”

“God no.” Jack wrapped his arms around her and rocked her. They had to get going right now but he needed to comfort her. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. You’re going to go underground and when you emerge, you’ll be stronger than ever. And you’re going to write articles that will make Woodward and Bernstein look like pikers. You’re going to win the Pulitzer. Guaranteed. I promise you.”

“The Pulitzer.” He pulled back and saw that she was trying to smile. It was an awful effort and wasn’t convincing but he was grateful she was trying.

“The Pulitzer,” he nodded. “But for now we have to get going.”

“Wait.”

Jack felt urgency thrum through his veins. He was nearly vibrating with it. But he obediently stopped.

She was frowning. “Is there anyone who can check up on my staff? Find out if they’re okay? Without letting them know that I’m alive?”

“Who are they? I’ll get Nick on it as soon as we’re airborne.”

“Zac Burroughs and Marcie Thompson, they’re based here in DC. Write the names down so you don’t forget.”

“I won’t forget,” Jack promised. He was used to memorizing eighteen digit codes. Two names were nothing. “Now let’s get going.”

Summer put on her coat and Hector’s coat over it and started wrapping the scarf around her lower face.

“Forget that.” Jack pulled out two full face helmets. “I’ve got something better.”

Summer stared. “How are you going to drive with that thing on?”

Jack pulled his helmet on, pulled down the visor. His voice came out muffled as he fitted hers on. “We’re not taking the SUV, we’re taking something faster.”

* * *

Kearns put down his newspaper for a second and watched the young man sitting next to the coffee shop’s windows. Zac Burroughs. Young, trendy haircut. Shaved on one side, long on the other. Completely oblivious to the outside world, head totally inside his laptop. This was going to be easy.

Kearns was sitting on a bench across the street from the coffee shop. He’d been careful not to leave any prints and he’d take the newspaper with him. He hauled out his cell and pretended to be engaged in it. People read books on their cells, he knew. It wasn’t hard to fake absorption. Kearns could see into the coffee shop and it was filled with people who were absorbed in their own stuff, no one was looking round.

There were also no security cams, which to Kearns meant the place didn’t earn enough money to warrant being robbed.

Great.

Burroughs finally closed his laptop and got up. He didn’t seem to be the kind to move fast, so Kearns gave him a big head start. When he got up, he put on his baseball cap with IR lights along the brim. Any security cams on the street would simply see a big blurred white dot instead of a face.

The target was walking along his street, with old growth trees whose roots were cracking the sidewalk. One building in three was abandoned. Zac lived in an old building six blocks down, at the end of the street—he was headed home. Home was the basement apartment. Kearns had checked.

Civilians were just clueless. It never failed to astonish Kearns. There was no way someone could follow him for six blocks without him being aware of it. He would be able to just clue in. Did soldiers develop some kind of sixth sense with all that intense training? Maybe subconsciously notice patterns that civilians didn’t? Whatever it was, it sometimes seemed to him that civilians walked around with PREY tattooed on their foreheads.

There was no need to hurry. Kearns kept back several hundred feet until Burroughs got to his block, then he started catching up with him. Countersurveillance training had taught him how to go fast without appearing to hurry. A lengthened stride, keeping the torso straight, not pumping his arms—anyone watching him would have to be an operator to notice that he had increased his speed by fifty per cent.

He caught up with Burroughs ten feet from the front gate. Keeping his head down, Kearns took the kid’s arm in a friendly grip. Two old friends meeting up.

“Hey Zac,” he said with an easy smile.

The kid looked up at him, frowning, but not concerned yet. If Kearns had been his own age, the kid wouldn’t even be frowning. He’d just assume that Kearns was part of that vast world of young people who congregated by the hundreds in bars and conventions. As it was, Kearns was visibly not of Burroughs’ generation and warranted a frown.

“Hey,” Burroughs answered cautiously, surreptitiously trying to pull away. Moron. The guy’s arm was so thin, Kearns’s hand fit around it. And as for pulling away—what Kearns felt beneath his fingers was soft, untoned muscle. Kearns’s grip had been measured at almost two hundred pounds. Thompson had about as much chance of tearing himself away from Kearns as he had of flying to the moon.

“How you doing, man?” Kearns asked genially. He was gripping Burroughs’ right arm with his left hand, while his right hand brought the jet syringe to the biceps and pressed the end, shooting five hundred milligrams of ketamine into his system, enough to induce what in clubs was called a k-hole, a ketamine high, strong enough to give the user an out of body experience.

The kid’s stride broke, but Kearns shifted his hold, putting his left arm around Burroughs’ shoulders and guiding him with his right. Kearns easily held Burroughs’ entire weight up. An outsider would see only a friendly bro-embrace. Two old buddies meeting up. Conveniently, Burroughs had a set of keys in his front right pocket. Really fast, but with no jerky movements at all, Kearns had him through the gate, down the shallow concrete steps to the basement apartment and inside.

The apartment was small, messy. The military beat messiness out of you. Burroughs would have earned an extra 150 pushups for keeping his personal space like this. Not that he could have done them, not with that muscle tone.

Kearns dropped Burroughs immediately inside the door, pulled out a pair of latex gloves and went hunting for the right place to dump the body. He found it immediately. A small closet just off the kitchen. Perfect.

He’d come prepared. In his backpack was a small spray bottle of bleach and a folded body bag taken from a small town morgue.

Back at the entrance, he held one gloved hand over Burroughs’ mouth and with the other he pinched the kid’s nostrils shut. The kid was so deeply under, his autonomous nervous system didn’t even kick in. In three minutes he was dead without having moved a muscle. Even better, his bowels and bladder didn’t void. That was always messy.

Burroughs was so light it was easy to fit him into the body bag. Kearns sprayed bleach on Burroughs’ upper body, zipped up the bag and shoved it into the closet. He took a tube out of his backpack—a new molecular binding agent that hardened into a glue stronger than concrete. He spread it around the jamb of the door, closed the door and squirted the binding agent into the keyhole.

Someone would have to take an axe to the door to get it open.

The underground apartment had a back door that gave out onto steps leading up to an alley. He walked out into the alley and would begin the long, slow series of evasive maneuvers to shake any possible tails.

One down, one to go.

Chapter Nine

Summer blinked at the huge black monster of a motorcycle then up at a Jack. Or at least at what she knew was behind that visor. The visor was tinted and not a trace of face was visible. Jack could just as well have been the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow for all anyone could see. “We’re going to ride that to the airport?”

He nodded. “You ever ridden a bike before?”

“Not like that. When I was eleven we lived in a village above Bangalore. Someone gave us an old scooter and I used to ride down to the city to do the shopping.”

She didn’t have to tell him why she was the one who had to ride the scooter. He knew. Her parents would have killed themselves riding a scooter when high. Which by the time she was eleven was basically all the time.

It was one of her few happy memories—putt-putting down the hillside into the cheerful chaos of the city then back with bags full of produce hanging perilously off the handlebars. After the first few trips, farmers along the way recognized her and waved. She’d felt free on that trip, free and unfettered.

This monstrous thing didn’t smile at her and promise freedom. It snarled and promised broken bones.

Jack handed her the helmet and helped her fit it over her head. She saw out surprisingly well and knew for a fact no one could see her face. Then he placed her purse over her shoulder so it hung gondolier-style.

“There are two rules. Hang onto me tightly and lean in the direction I’m leaning. You got that?”

“Hang on tight and lean when you lean,” she repeated and that mirrored visor nodded.

He rolled the bike from its resting place against a backyard wooden wall where it had been covered with a tarpaulin.

“Hop on.” Jack’s head was turned to her, that alien visage a little creepy. He held out a big hand and she lifted her leg and mounted the bike. Her legs didn’t reach the ground but his did. She put her feet onto the footrests and put her arms around his lean waist. They sat there for a moment, as her arms expanded and contracted with each breath he took. He switched on the engine and she felt a powerful surge of energy between her thighs, a low thrumming almost sexual in its intensity. That insectoid head turned. “Hold on!”

She held on as Jack rolled them out of the asphalt square and onto the road. He kept it slow in the city and opened up on the Parkway, weaving in and out of traffic. He was going really fast. When she could open her eyes, Summer peeked at the speedometer and saw 110 mph. After which, she closed her eyes, lay her head against his back and simply hung on, matching his every move by feel and not by sight.

She opened her eyes when they crossed the Potomac on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. He slowed down a little because there were gusty winds halfway across, but they crossed the bridge without incident and picked up speed again. They turned east but if they had continued, the road would have led straight to her apartment.

The apartment that was no longer there. Summer lifted her head from Jack’s back and looked behind her, where her home would have been if she still had a home. Everything she owned had been in there. She actually hadn’t owned that much. Summer had learned to travel light at such a young age it was ingrained now. But still. A Shaker chest of drawers she’d restored herself. A pretty Limoges tea set she’d given to herself at the first 100,000 views. Two watercolors by a college friend that hadn’t been worth much on the open market but which she found incredibly pretty. Her clothes.

Most everything could be replaced and her most important possessions—her files—were in the cloud.

It made her sad to think that it had been so easy to wipe all her material possessions out. The past was gone and the future...the future seemed so dim, impenetrable.

Since she’d landed in the US and started attending Darby’s School for Girls, she’d been very goal oriented. The next class, the next course—she’d followed her own internal plan and it had been crystal clear to her every step of the way. Now the future wasn’t clear, it was murky and muddied.

The past gone and the future dim, what was left?

Jack lifted his hand from the handlebars and placed it over her hands clasped around his waist. He was wearing thick rider’s gloves so of course she couldn’t feel the touch of his skin, but crazily, she felt a little better.

Wherever she was going, she wasn’t going alone. She had company for this part of the ride, anyway.

The turnoff to the airport was ahead of them and Jack banked sharply into the feed road. Instead of going to departures however, he took a side road that eventually took them to a section of the airport she’d never seen before. Jack drove right out onto the tarmac, past a couple of planes, until he stopped at the foot of a set of stairs leading up into the cabin of a small jet.

Jack cut the engine and the world went silent. She slid off the back and swayed for a second, her legs weak. It felt like she was still riding that monster bike. Jack held her hand tightly as he dismounted, providing stability. Summer started taking her helmet off when he stopped her hands, shook his head and motioned to the stairs.

It wasn’t until they were in the actual airplane cabin, away from the door, that Jack took his helmet off, and lifted hers away. All the shades were down in the cabin, which was lit with soft lighting.

Two very serious-looking men emerged from the cockpit, dressed in short sleeved white shirts with wings on their collars. The older pilot shook Jack’s hand. “Delvaux. Nice to hear the rumors of your death were wrong.”

The other pilot shook Jack’s hand, too, then shook hers. “Ma’am,” they said in unison. At no point did they introduce themselves or call her by name.

The senior pilot turned to Jack. “We are here to pick up a Mr. and Mrs. Whitmore of Reston, Virginia. No trace of your presence is anywhere in writing. Nick said someone will pick the bike up and store it somewhere safe. Flying time will be six hours, we’ll land at 2:00 p.m. local time. There’s coffee and soft drinks, sandwiches and a cheese platter in the galley. Felicity assured us that inflight communications will be encrypted so feel free to contact anyone at ASI. If you get settled, we’re scheduled for takeoff in ten minutes. Have a nice flight.” He touched two fingers to his forehead and turned to her. “Ma’am.”

She nodded. They disappeared into the cockpit as Jack took her elbow. “The plane has a small office, through that bulkhead door. Please sit down and prepare for takeoff.”

Through the door was indeed an office. It looked expensive but not luxurious. A working office, not a sop to a rich businessman’s ego. There were eight business class sized seats in two rows of two side by side. The rest of the area was taken up by a miniature office setup—a round table with four seats around it, an array of laptops and tablets secured against the wall and plenty of wall sockets.

A bell sounded, the senior pilot’s voice came on the air. “Prepare for takeoff.”

Jack waved his hand at the seats. “Here. Aisle or window?”

“Window.” Might as well watch as she flew away from her life. They sat down and Jack buckled her seat belt for her, as if she were ten years old. Summer didn’t say anything because Jack seemed to derive some kind of pleasure from taking care of her, seeing to her comfort. She had no idea why, but hell, might as well roll with it. She wasn’t often pampered.

He handed her a glass of sparkling water and sat down himself. “It could be champagne if you wanted. There’s a bottle in the fridge.”

She shook her head. “It’s sort of a rule of mine. No champagne before noon.” Summer smiled, drank the water and handed him back the empty glass. “Thanks.”

The plane taxied for a few minutes, then rolled to a stop at the head of the runway, waiting for permission for takeoff. When the plane started accelerating, Jack reached for her hand and held it tightly.

She stared out the window at the scenery streaking by and smiled. “Please tell me you’re not afraid of flying.”

“Nope. I’ve flown in a billion third world rustbuckets, with pilots who were either drunk or high or both. I’m not afraid of a Gulfstream and two former Air Force pilots. Just wanted to hold your hand.”

He held it as they accelerated and leaped into the sky.

Summer enjoyed flying, being above the earth, away from its cares. Lately, she’d spent all her flights working, as she was always under deadline. She was going to do some work on this flight too, later, when the jumble in her head settled. There were three laptops available and she’d start putting order in her thoughts, start doing some research. There was no deadline. There were no deadlines at all, if
Area 8
was down.

Summer looked down as the plane banked over green suburban Virginia and lifted its way west. Below, at the very edge of visibility, was DC, with its monuments and power structures.

There was a very real possibility that people down there, Americans who were part of that power structure, were plotting to bring the country down. Undoubtedly they’d plotted the Washington Massacre. They were more dangerous, more insidious than the foreigners who hated America.

This was the most hated sin of all—treason. The enemy within. She had no concept of why they would do it. Maybe those most potent of temptations—money and power. It was inconceivable to her, but there it was. In her job she’d seen what a lot of people would do for money and power.

So many lives had been lost in the Washington Massacre—swept away in violence, like swatting flies. Her life had been lost, too, though her heart kept beating. As she watched DC fade into the distance, she realized she was flying away from her own life, left behind in dust and ashes, like her apartment. Her home, gone.
Area 8
, gone.

Zac and Marcie would be worried about her. The news of her apartment blowing up would break soon. When Zac and Marcie heard that, they’d try to contact her via the cellphone Jack had thrown into the Potomac as they crossed the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

They’d be frantic, but she couldn’t call them and reassure them.

Her life was unraveling so quickly, she couldn’t hold the threads together.

Her old life was lost, tossed away by evil forces. What would the new life be like, standing in the rubble of her old one?

“Hey.” Jack reached over with the hand not holding hers and turned her head away from the window and toward him. “It’ll be okay.”

“No,” she smiled sadly. “It won’t. But thanks for the thought.”

His face was sober, serious. “We’ll get them, Summer. Whatever it is that is happening, we’ll stop it and catch the people behind it. These are
Americans
. Plotting against our country. They are going to be caught and tried for treason. The Director of the FBI has set up a secret task force, and we’ve got the guys of ASI. None better.”

She tightened her hand around his. “Who are these people, anyway? ASI. I assume we’re in their plane?”

“Yeah.” His face lightened slightly. Clearly thinking about this ASI made him happy. “It’s a security company set up and staffed mainly by former SEALs. We joked a lot about the snake-eaters in the Clandestine Service and we liked to think we were better, certainly sneakier, definitely better-looking and better-dressed, but the truth is, SEALs are the best of the best. The company was founded by former Commander John Huntington and former Senior Chief Douglas Kowalski. They were famous for getting the job done, back in the day. And their company is quietly famous. They get the job done but keep a low profile, just like when they were in the military. They don’t advertise their services, but they have work pouring in because they are really good. They also recruited a super genius to head their IT section, Felicity Ward, the one I told you about. She used to work with the FBI.”

“Sounds like a good company,” Summer said. She tried to keep the wistfulness out of her voice.
Area 8
, in its own way, had been a good company, too. And it, too, got the job done.
Area 8
worked with the top people in the field and she’d always tried to create a collaborative atmosphere.

Summer had worked so hard and had had such high hopes for the future. And now everything had been blown apart.

“It is.” Jack had shifted in his seat so his whole body was facing hers. Wide shoulders blocked her view of the rest of the plane. The wall behind her, his broad body on the other side—she should have felt hemmed in, but she didn’t. He’d managed to create a sort of cocoon with his own body and she felt oddly protected. It was like they were in a small space together, sharing confidences. “My sister’s fiancé is their newest employee. Joe Harris. You heard him on the phone. Got shot up badly but he put himself back together and just started working for them.”

Summer smiled. “I’m so happy for Isabel. I hope he’s a good guy. She deserves someone nice.” Like Jack, Isabel had lost everything in the Massacre. Her entire family except for Jack, the family home, the family fortune—everything.

“Joe? He’s the best. Not only does he make Isabel happy, he’s guaranteed to keep her safe or die trying. And SEALs are really hard to kill. He saved her life when Hector kidnapped her. It’s an incredible story. I’ll tell you about it.”

“You will, very definitely. Remember you promised me this story. I’ll publish the articles in
Area 8
, when I can go online again.”

“A book,” Jack said. “You need to publish a book and it’ll win a Pulitzer.”

“Unless we’re all dead.”

Jack kissed her hand. “We won’t die. You sure won’t. Not as long as I’m alive.”

He took her breath away. Summer blinked back tears, changed the subject. “Well, Joe Harris is getting a good deal, and eating really well, too.” Isabel was a superb cook—chef level, though she didn’t do it professionally. She’d had her own blog,
Foodways
, that Summer had been addicted to. It stopped right after the Washington Massacre.

“Yeah.” Jack was watching her carefully. “What I’m trying to say is that there are some good people working on this. You’ve been caught up in something horrible and it must seem like your life has stopped, but it’ll get straightened out. I won’t—”

He stopped abruptly, jaw snapping shut.