Red Knight Falling (5 page)

SEVEN

I didn’t see the woman who sidled up to me, not until she spoke.

“This wine is basically plonk,” she said, cradling a glass of cabernet, “but I suppose I can’t complain.”

Her flame-red wrap dress and Louboutin heels belonged on a Milan runway, not in the lobby of a wilderness lodge. Not a strand of her artfully cut blonde bob was out of place, and her nails might have been manicured with a laser beam. She was Hollywood perfect, in a way that only existed on the silver screen.

“I, uh,” I said eloquently. “I mean, it’s included in the room price, so I guess you can’t hope for too much.”

“And one must always respond to a host’s graciousness with gratitude, no matter how misguided or inadequate their efforts.” She offered her hand. “I’m Nadine, by the way.”

Her palm was warm to the touch, and the way her fingers curled around mine was more like a caress than a handshake. For a heartbeat, I almost forgot the name on my Oceanic Polymer business cards. “Marilyn. Marilyn Fischer.”

“Marilyn.” She smiled, flashing perfect white teeth. “I pictured you with a more . . . musical name. What do you do, Marilyn?”

“I’m in accounting,” I said. “And you?”

“I’m a headhunter,” she said, “working in corporate acquisitions. You could call me a talent scout. Say, you don’t happen to have a card, do you? Sometimes we’re on the lookout for people with a flair for finance.”

I fished one of the cards out of my jeans pocket. My fingertip clicked the control pen in passing, snatching a few shots of Nadine’s face.

“I like working with financial people.” Her fingers snaked the card from my outstretched hand. “They’re so grounded. It’s important to be able to assess the benefits and risks of any business decision, don’t you agree?”

I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but I felt like a helium balloon at the end of her string.

“Absolutely.”

“After all, every decision has a cost attached. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Marilyn.” She held up the card. “I’ll be in touch.”

She melted into the churning crowd, all smiles and grace. I tried to get my footing back, mingled a little, and ended up drafted into a half-hour conversation with an elderly couple who wanted to show me every single photograph from their last four vacations. Jessie eventually swooped in to rescue me, curling her arm around mine and steering me toward a quieter corner of the lobby.

“I just had the weirdest damn conversation—” she started to say.

“Let me guess: talent scout in a red silk dress, looks a lot like Taylor Swift?”

“Weird as
hell
. Went out of her way to talk about the wolves that roam the forest here and how much I’d love seeing them.”

Jessie owed her supernatural physical prowess—and her turquoise eyes—to her father. Dear old dad was a prolific serial killer and a servant of an extradimensional creature called the King of Wolves. Nobody outside of Vigilant Lock—and very few people inside it—knew that, though.

“I gave her my civilian cover,” I said. “I don’t think she bought it for a second. I wouldn’t say she threatened me, but it was the friendliest unfriendliness I’ve ever seen.”

Jessie shrugged. “I thought she was cruising me at first. So what’s your take? She with the competition?”

“I don’t think so. She wanted to make a splash, get people buzzing about her—that’s pretty much the exact opposite of a clandestine operation. Maybe she’s just a super-extrovert. Still, I got some good close-up shots; I’ll run them through the IPS along with everybody else I photographed and see if anything pops.”

The Interstate Photo Service is one of the Bureau’s newest toys: a facial-recognition database with over fifty-two million photos on file. Mug shots, security-clearance applications, routine employment checks—if you’ve ever smiled for a government camera, you’re probably in the system.

“Guys.” Kevin scurried up to us, April in tow, looking tense. “We have a problem.”

Jessie tilted her head. “Nadine talked to you, too?”

“Who? No, I’ve been with Bette and her friends the whole time. They’re students at the University of Oregon. Half of them are astronomy majors, and
all
of ’em are hardcore members of the local MUFON chapter.”

“MUFON?” I asked.

“The Mutual UFO Network,” April said drily, encasing the words in air quotes. “UFO and alien . . . enthusiasts.”

“Word about the Red Knight
leaked
,” Kevin said. “It’s all over the deep web. Most people are treating it like just another pile of conspiracy-theory BS, but Bette and her pals are local enough that they decided to turn it into a road trip—they’re going to hit the woods and start looking for it when it crashes.”

I groaned. “Great. That’s all we need, a gaggle of civvies underfoot. Do they even know where they’re supposed to be looking?”

“Like I said, they’re into astronomy, big-time. One of their guys thinks he’s picked up the Red Knight’s orbit. The telemetry he showed me looked a whole lot like the same data Agent Lawrence is working with.”

Vigilant Lock protocol, when it comes to handling civilians who see things they shouldn’t, gets hazy. That’s because we don’t have things like hypnosis gadgets or memory-wiping chemicals to handle a security breach. Ultimately it comes down to convincing them they’re delusional, cowing or bribing them into silence, or . . . escalating the situation. The kind of escalation involving silenced pistols and encrypted calls to Vigilant’s cleaners. Nobody wants to type the words
Feel free to summarily execute United States citizens
into a training manual, but we’re all aware it’s on the table.

On Linder’s table, at least, but our team doesn’t work that way. Our job is
protecting
the innocent; sanctioning a civilian is never an option, much less a whole crew of college kids on a road trip. And that meant we had a new problem to deal with.

The four of us got dinner in the lodge’s café, ears perked and eyes open. Barring the oddity with Nadine, we hadn’t spotted any candidates for our mysterious competition, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here. I just hoped we were as invisible as they were.

Dinner was a crispy BLT wrap—fresh, clean, simple—and a glass of huckleberry lemonade, which carried the perfect balance of tart and sweet. My mind wasn’t on the food so much as it was on Kevin’s new friends and how we were going to keep them out of trouble.

“I’m not worried about
us
,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I mean, if we cross paths out there, we just pull an ‘in the interests of national security’ line. At worst, if they happen to photograph anything they shouldn’t, we confiscate their cell phones and that’s the end of it.”

April gestured with a forkful of garden salad, catching my drift. “But we aren’t the only bears in those particular woods. And anyone else chasing the Red Knight might not treat them as gently.”

“We can’t talk them out of going,” Kevin said. “Trust me, they think they’re on a treasure hunt. Fun and adventure and a cooler full of beer. They’re pretty much the cast of a horror movie just waiting to happen.”

Jessie sipped her Coke, thinking it over.

“Maybe we can scare them off,” she said. “Break into their rooms wearing masks, put guns to their heads, and tell ’em to go home. I’d rather they be scared than dead.”

I shook my head. “Too loud, and it might just make them dig their heels in even harder. If they have any doubt that the Red Knight is real, that’d erase it completely.”

“All right,” Jessie said, “let’s sleep on it. We can put our heads together tomorrow morning, after we hook up with Lawrence. On that note? Everybody stays buttoned down in their rooms tonight.
Something
weird is going on here, and I don’t want anybody wandering off alone.”

Turning in early sounded like a good idea. I’d dozed on the flight to Oregon, but it barely counted as sleep, and tomorrow promised to be a long day and a longer night. And if that gigantic
thing
from the satellite photographs showed up, screaming down after the Red Knight’s debris like a moth to a candle, I still had no idea what I was going to do about it.

Which would be fine, if there was anybody I could call for help. There wasn’t. Jessie had her strength and speed, April had her analytic insight, and Kevin had his computers. I had magic. If the Red Knight entity showed up at the crash site, they would all be counting on me to deal with it.

I don’t know what worried me more: the thought of what that thing might do if it got loose on Earth, or the thought of letting my team down.

Jessie was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. I pulled a starchy blanket over my head, muffling her snoring, and eventually drifted off into an uneasy slumber.

I woke up, jolted from a dream I couldn’t remember. The LED alarm clock burned emerald in the dark, reading 12:44.

Jessie crouched near my bed, dressed in a nightshirt, holding her gun. She looked my way and put her finger to her lips, then waved me over.

I slid out from under the sheets, as quietly as I could, and padded behind her. The grainy hardwood floor felt like shaved ice against the soles of my bare feet. Closer to the door, I could hear what she heard: someone fumbling at the lock next door. Trying to get into April and Kevin’s room.

She held up three fingers and looked back. I nodded, grabbing my Glock from the end table and getting ready. On a silent three count, she yanked the door open and we rushed into the hallway.

Kevin froze. Hair disheveled, looking half-awake, he’d been fumbling with his room key.

“Oh,” he said, “hey.”

Jessie lowered her gun. “What the
hell
, Kevin? What part of ‘stay buttoned down’ did you not understand?”

He ducked his head, sheepish. “My throat was scratchy. Wanted to run down and get a soda so I wouldn’t be coughing all night and keeping April up.”

“Then you should have come and woken one of us up,” I said. “We don’t know who our enemies are or where they are. It’s too dangerous to be alone.”

“Sorry,”
he said. “Jeez, sorry.”

“Go to sleep,” Jessie said with an exasperated sigh. I followed her back into our room. As the door clicked shut, though, she pressed her back to it and broke into a grin.

“What?” I asked.

“Somebody,” she said, “is getting over his imaginary ex-girlfriend.”

“Kevin? What happened?”

“You know how my sense of smell is a lot sharper than most people’s?” She tapped her index finger against the side of her nose. “The nose knows. He was getting
something
all right, but it wasn’t a Coke.”

“You mean . . .” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Wait. Did Kevin just have
sex
?”

She smirked. “I don’t know if it was a home run, but I’m thinking he at
least
made it to second base. Our boy got lucky tonight.”

I started to ask “with who,” but the answer was obvious.

“Bette,” I said.

“Spelled,” Jessie said, imitating her voice, “with a
t
and an
e
on the end. Much as I want to come down on him for sneaking out like that, this is the best news I’ve gotten all week. He’s digging out from under Mikki’s dead thumb.”

“He’s healing,” I said. “Well. You know what this means: now we
have
to make sure those kids get out of here safely.”

Jessie did a belly flop onto her mattress.

“Ah, geeks in love. Or lust. Either’s good. G’night.”

Before I got back under my sheets, she was snoring again.

EIGHT

Morning came too soon, but at least there was a continental breakfast attached. Down in the lobby, the tables for last night’s wine tasting had been repurposed as a free-floating buffet, with baskets offering fresh muffins and single-serving boxes of cereal.

“Eat up,” Jessie mumbled around the bagel half sticking out of her mouth. “Lot of miles ahead of us today.”

I craned my neck, taking in faces, looking for anyone new. No notable faces, except an absent one: Nadine was nowhere to be found. Neither was Agent Lawrence, for that matter. It was 8:04, and he didn’t strike me as the kind of man who missed an appointment even by a minute.

“I don’t like this,” I told Jessie. “Take a jog down to his cabin with me?”

Spotting Bette and the other would-be satellite hunters, Jessie beckoned Kevin close.

“Harmony and I are going to hunt down our esteemed colleague,” she told him. “Do me a favor: go have breakfast with your new friend, and keep your ears open.”

“Got it,” Kevin said, nodding firmly.

“I want to know where they’re gonna be at all times. If they’ve made any kind of a hiking plan, if you see any marked maps, memorize all of it. Consider this training for real fieldwork, all right? Do a good job and we can talk about letting you out from behind the computer more often.”

His eyes lit up. “All right! You can count on me.”

Jessie slapped his shoulder. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

As he made his way over to the back table, April watched him go with a faintly amused look on her face.

“A mysterious absence in the evening hours, heightened enthusiasm and bravado the morning after . . . not hard to follow those clues. A certain someone just enjoyed a bit of intimate company.”

Jessie put her hands on her hips and sighed.

“Nope, I don’t date coworkers, and Harmony here insists she isn’t queer.” She cupped her hand to one side of her mouth and dropped to a stage whisper. “We need to talk to her about her wardrobe, okay?”

“I meant
Kevin
,” April said, both of them ignoring my very best death glare. “This is a good sign. He’s taking his first steps, growing past his fixation on Mikki. Tracking Roman Steranko should still be our top priority once this mission is complete—for his client list as much as anything else—but Kevin might just be able to find closure on his own.”

“Can you keep an eye on him while we grab Lawrence?” I asked her. “Just in case.”

She shooed us off. “I won’t let him get in over his head. Now, go on: I’m sure the esteemed Agent Lawrence has spent the better part of his evening coming up with new insults for us, and you won’t want to miss a single one.”

Beyond the parking lot, a wide and pebbled path snaked into the sparse forest. We were still on the lodge’s grounds, and it showed—all the trees were carefully pruned back, the path swept clean. A taste of nature, without the messy bits. Small signs posted at each branch in the trail bore letters artfully seared into the wood, pointing the way to the private cabins.

We could tell which was Agent Lawrence’s cabin as soon as we rounded the bend. It was the one with the kicked-in front door hanging on one twisted hinge.

Jessie’s smile vanished, and the Glock seemed to sprout from her hand, drawn in a blur. I pulled mine, keeping it in a firm grip as we kept low and headed for the log cabin in a cautious sprint. We didn’t need to talk: we knew what to do and what we expected of each other.

Jessie was the first one across the threshold, sweeping her gun sights left. I stepped in at her shoulder and broke right, covering the other half of the room. I took it all in—the splintered furniture, the ransacked luggage on the sliced-open mattress—but no signs of life. And a single corpse, laying facedown on the cabin floor in a pool of dried blood.

I kicked him over onto his back. Not Lawrence. I didn’t know the man, but he’d met his doom with a range-perfect Mozambique Drill: two shots to center mass and one between the eyes.

“Lawrence put up a fight,” Jessie said, prowling the wreckage.

I put on my glasses and snapped a postmortem photo. Whoever the dead man was, if he was in the system, we’d find him. Then I crouched down and peeled his bloody shirt back to get a good look at his skin. His flesh, where he’d been left facedown, was mottled and purple.

“Extensive livor mortis,” I said. “Can’t tell time of death for certain without a full forensic workup, but I’d say this happened sometime last night.”

Jessie shook her head. “Lawrence is still alive. If they’d killed him, they would have left his body here with their buddy’s. That means he’s been in enemy hands for at least eight hours.”

We shared a glance, and the same thought, as we raced from the ransacked cabin and back up the pebbled trail.
April and Kevin.

We found them just where we’d left them. Kevin, chatting up his new friends, and April—invisible in her chair—idly watching the lobby from a spot by the windows. We broke off, Jessie striding toward April while I moved up and clamped a hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” I told him, “the CEO’s on the phone, calling from New York. He wants to talk to us about that new infrastructure improvement.”

He said his good-byes, and we hustled the entire team back up to our room. Jessie walked them through what we’d found. Kevin’s eyes got wider, while April’s got harder.

“To say we have a security leak would be an understatement,” April said, “and it’s about to get much worse. If they’ve taken Lawrence alive, they’re wringing him dry as we speak.”

I paced the room, thinking fast. “Not here, though. They need someplace remote, away from the tourist traffic. Someplace they can interrogate him uninterrupted.”

Someplace he can scream as loudly as he wants to,
I thought, but I didn’t need to say it.

“All right,” Jessie said. “Auntie April, you got that Glock handy?”

“Locked and loaded, and don’t call me Auntie while we’re working.”

She waved me to the door. “Harmony and I are going to track down Lawrence. In the meantime, I want the two of you barricaded in here. Don’t go near the windows, and don’t open up for
anybody
, you got me? We don’t know how much these people know, or how much they know about
us
.”

We heard them locking up behind us as we sprinted down the hall, taking the stairs to the lobby two at a time. I headed straight for the check-in desk, where the same clerk from yesterday was wiping down the wooden counter with a wet paper towel.

“We’re trying to meet up with a friend of ours,” I told him, “and I think he got some bad directions. Is there anywhere else in the area where people tend to camp out? Like, off the beaten path?”

He rubbed his chin, thinking. “Well, there’s always the woods, if you
really
want to go off the trail, but there’s also an RV camp not far outside Sisters—you probably passed it on your way over.”

I remembered it. Half-empty, but still too big of a crowd for what Lawrence’s kidnappers probably had in mind.

“What about places that are closed for the season already? We talked to him on the phone, before his signal gave out, and it sounded like he was the only person around.”

“Huh. Not as much—the state government’s really strict about who gets to build inside the forest.” He paused and snapped his fingers. “There
is
the Suttle Lake Bible Camp. It’s a summer camp, for the kids. If your friend got turned around on Brookline Road, he could end up there, easy.”

“We’ll check it out,” Jessie said. “How do we get there?”

“Just take a left out of the parking lot. Road runs all the way around Suttle Lake: if you’re going north, you’ll pass it eventually. I’d say it’s a twenty-minute drive or so.”

We made it in ten.

An iron gate stood at the head of the dirt road, but somebody had gone ahead and opened it for us. A length of chain, chopped clean with a bolt cutter, lay coiled in the dust. To one side, a sign bore the face of a smiling sun rising over a hand-painted slogan:
S
UTTLE
L
AKE
B
IBLE
C
AMP
: W
HERE
W
E
L
EARN
, G
ROW
,
AND
H
AVE
F
UN
!

I killed the ignition. We went the rest of the way on foot, scurrying down a steep slope paved with wooden-log stairs, into the compound below. Olive-roofed cabins stood empty and dark, locked up tight for the season, windows sealed under thick sheets of glazed plastic to shield them from the coming winter.

It was still a shooting gallery. Too many angles, too many places for a gunman to hide in wait. I nodded to one side, and Jessie followed me as we skirted the backs of the outermost cabins. Minimizing the ways anyone could come at us. Not minimized to zero, though.

Jessie squinted, tapped my shoulder, and pointed. I followed her gaze. One of the cabin doors had been jimmied open the crude way, the frame bearing the scars of a heavy-duty crowbar. It hung open, just a couple of inches.

I was first through the door this time, breaking left. I froze. Jessie stood at my side.

“Damn it,”
she breathed.

We’d found Agent Lawrence.