Repairman Jack [10]-Harbingers (43 page)

He hadn't wanted the survivor to be Miller. He'd been pretty sure he could get one of the others to crack, but sensed Miller would be too tough.

On the other hand, he'd wanted to go mano a mano with Miller, wanted—
needed
—to make it personal.

And he had.

Miller's pockets had been virtually empty; his wallet hadn't yielded a clue. Jack still had no idea where they were hiding their new O.

Okay, try the others. A grisly task, and no more fruitful than Miller. The only thing of interest was a dark blue doodad hanging from a lanyard around Gold's neck. It was lozenge-shaped, a couple-three inches long, imprinted with PRE-TEC and 8GB.

Looked like a flash drive.

He hurried over to his laptop and plugged it into a USB port. But when he accessed the drive, all he found was gibberish. Maybe the explosion had scrambled its memory. Maybe Russ Tuit could unscramble it.

He pocketed the drive and the car keys Jolliff had been carrying. One place left to search.

Outside, he combed through the Suburban's interior, emptying the glove compartment, checking all the storage pockets. He hit pay dirt atop the driver's visor: a round-trip Steamship Authority ferry ticket for a car and three extra passengers from and to Nantucket.

Okay. That had to be it. The new safe house was on Nantucket. But where on Nantucket? All he knew about the place was that it was an island off the Massachusetts coast, somewhere near Martha's Vineyard. But he'd know more real soon.

7

The guy came back and squatted before him. He held out a slip of paper and waggled it. Through his fog of agony Miller saw a ferry pass.

Shit.

"So she's on Nantucket. Care to tell me where?"

"Fuck you." It came out like a groan.

"I'm not out to harm her—anything but. Unlike you, I don't target women and children. But I
am
going to find her. You can make it easier by telling me where."

"You gotta be kidding me. The fuck would I do that?"

"'Cause maybe it'll help undo what you've done."

Undo? Was this guy crazy?

"No way."

The guy raised the pistol in his other hand—Miller's own H-K—and said, "Then you're no good to me."

Miller had known this was coming. To his surprise, he felt no fear. Torture he feared. Dying clean and quick… not so bad. He'd sworn to die for his Oculus if necessary. Now it was necessary.

He looked the guy in the eyes and said, "Things'd be different if we'd had a fair fight."

The guy looked sad. "No such thing as fair. You of all people should know that."

He saw the barrel come level with his face.

Saw the cold eyes behind it.

Saw the muzzle flash.

Then saw nothing.

Ever again.

8

Jack wished he could have found more satisfaction in standing over Miller's fresh corpse. But he felt nothing—too dead inside to feel anything but grief and loss and rage.

Straightened and looked around. Time to get out of Dodge.

He did a sweep, removing the three undetonated bombs, then the newspaper-stuffed backpack and the battery-operated timer from the locker. He'd had Russ reset it to flash a countdown from ten to zero in a continuous loop so that whoever saw it would think they had only seconds before an explosion. The bombs and timer went into the backpack, as did his laptop. He stepped outside and looked around. All quiet.

9

Back at the hospital he left his hardware in his car on the chance that Security had taken his warning seriously. They had: Made him pass through a metal detector before being allowed upstairs. Good for them.

He found Dr. Stokely charting at the nursing station.

"Dare I ask?" he said.

Her expression was grim as she shook her head. "I wish I had good news for you, Mister Westphalen."

"Call me Jack."

"If you wish. What I wish is that I could tell you there's been no change in Gia and Vicky, but…"

He leaned against the wall.

"Oh, no."

She nodded. "Gia's showing signs of the brain stem herniation I warned you about. And Vicky… well, we can't seem to stop her seizures. We've thrown everything we have at her and it works for a little while, but then she starts convulsing again. She's quiet now, but I've never seen anything like it."

I'm sure you haven't, Jack thought.

"What happens if she doesn't stop?"

"Status epilepticus will, for want of a better term, fry her neurons. Cause cerebral edema. She'll herniate her brain stem, just like her mother."

"Brain death… like the Schiavo thing?"

"No. That was different. That was a persistent vegetative state. Schiavo still had her brain stem intact, and thus the basic brain functions that keep the body alive—circulation, respiration, and so on. That won't be true in the case of your wife and daughter."

"You mean…?"

She nodded. "With significant herniation… total shutdown of vital systems… the end."

She might as well have slapped his face.

Numb, he said, "What Glasgow score have you got them at now?"

"Three."

He felt himself swaying. "That's as low as you can go."

Another nod. "Yes, it is."

"How much longer?"

"At this rate… twenty-four hours. I wouldn't get too far from here, Mister Wes—Jack."

But he had to go far. Probably to Nantucket. It was the only chance they had.

He walked over to their beds. When he saw the gauze patches over Gia's eyes he did an about face and returned to Stokely.

"What's with—?"

"The eye patches? That's to keep them from drying out or being injured. Gia has lost her corneal reflexes."

Goddammit he
had
to find the new O. The previous one had said something about being one of the Ally's eyes. Jack was counting on that… praying it was an open connection.

10

In a black fog he walked over to Russ Tuit's place on Second Avenue in the east nineties. Smelled like they were frying tortillas in the Tex-Mex restaurant below.

Russ greeted him at the door.

"How'd that timer work out?"

"Perfect."

Russ, a redheaded code head with pale skin that most likely had not seen the sun in the thirty-odd years of his life, had garbed his pear shape in a flannel shirt and old corduroys worn almost smooth. No matter what the season, he wore flip-flops.

"Still not going to tell me what you used it for?"

"Probably better you don't know."

Jack handed him the flash drive.

Russ's eyebrows shot up. "Eight gigs. Cool. But what's this crud on it?" He scraped at the crusty stains with a thumbnail. "Hey this looks like—" His head shot up and he stared at Jack. "—blood. Is it?"

Jack said nothing.

Russ nodded, looking a bit queasy. "Yeah, yeah. Probably better I don't know, right?"

"Probably. Thing is, I think it may be messed up. I can't make any sense of what's on it."

"Let's take a look."

Russ plugged it into his computer and hit a few keys. Jack watched his screen fill with the same gibberish he'd found.

"See?" Jack said. "It's screwed up."

Russ turned to him. "Yeah, it's screwed up, but in a special way: It's encrypted. Probably one-twenty-eight bit."

"And that means?"

"Means we need a decryption key."

"Where do we get that?"

"From the mother computer that encrypted it, or…" He smiled.

"Or what?"

"Or I run it through my own personal decryption program."

"What do you mean, personal?"

"It means I wrote the code. It's the reason—all right, one of the reasons—I'm not allowed online for the next twenty-two-point-two years."

Russ had done a two-year, soft-time jolt in a fed pen for a shopping list of Internet crimes, most of them bank related. One of the conditions of his parole had been a quarter-century ban from the Internet.

"Okay. How long and how much?"

"Can't say how long. Can't even say I'll succeed."

"I need it yesterday, Russ."

"Okay, okay, I'll crank on it. As for how much: two-fifty just for trying, five hundred if I break it." As if anticipating a protest, he quickly added, "The two-fifty is for my time and the use of my proprietary software." He gestured around at his front room, furnished in contemporary crummy. "I need cash to maintain this lavish lifestyle."

"Deal."

Russ rubbed his chin. "Got a feeling I low-balled myself."

Jack grabbed a pad off his desk and scribbled his cell number, then wrote "Nantucket."

"I need anything and everything on that drive that has to do with Nantucket. And I need it fast." He peeled five fifties from his cash roll. "Here's the down payment. Another two fifty later and a five-hundred bonus if you get it done before six tomorrow morning."

Russ grinned—he really needed a new toothbrush. "
Awright!
I'm on it. If it's doable, I'm the guy to do it."

11

Back in his apartment, Jack Googled Nantucket. He found a boomerang-shaped island thirty miles south of Cape Cod. Small: only fifty square miles. Only? That was twice the size of Manhattan. Not good. But year-round residents numbered just under ten thousand. Much better, but still a lot of people. Loads better though than the forty to fifty thousand on the island in the summer.

He figured the islanders would be, well, insular, and the kind who knew everybody's business. They'd sure as hell know if a bunch of sunglass-wearing outsiders and a teenage girl had moved in among them. But would they tell another outsider? Jack had his doubts.

So he needed Russ to ferret out a name or address or anything involving Nantucket from that flash drive. Otherwise he'd have to tackle the island on his own and find some locals to chat up, see if they'd come across with any hints as to the whereabouts of the yeniçeri.

A very iffy proposition since Jack had little time and no illusions about his chatting-up abilities. They stank.

In the meantime, he'd hang at the hospital and hope for the best… hope he wouldn't have to go to Nantucket at all.

He realized what an idiotic hope that was, but he wasn't giving up on Gia and Vicky. Not ever.

FRIDAY

1

Cal lay in bed in the dark and listened to the wind howl around the house. He had one of the eight downstairs bedrooms to himself. Each could sleep four, but the MV's butchered numbers didn't require that sort of crowding.

He checked the clock again—4:11—then grabbed his cell phone from the night stand and checked that: Yeah, it was on, but still no call from Miller or any of the others.

The plan had been for Miller to call once they were on their way back to Hyannis.

Cal hit his speed-dial button for Miller—only the tenth or twelfth time in the last hour. He listened to a long series of rings before the leave-a-message voice came on.

Realizing sleep was impossible, Cal slipped out of bed and padded into the hall. To his left he saw a figure silhouetted in a glowing window. He walked toward it.

"How's it going, Grell?"

In the wash of light from the security floodlamps outside, he could make out the binocs hanging from Greli's neck and the twelve-gauge shotgun, the Bushmaster, and the sniper rifle leaning beside the window. The super-bright lights automatically turned on at dusk and stayed on until dawn.

The silhouette nodded. "All quiet on the southern front. What're you do-ing up?'

"Waiting to hear from Miller."

"No call yet?"

"Nope."

"Shit."

Yeah. Shit.

Cal headed upstairs to the computer that occupied a small study off the great room.

"Just me," he said as he spotted Novak in the sunroom where he had a view of both the harbor and the ocean, as well as north.

He lit up the computer and started searching the news services for stories of gunfire in a New York hospital.

Nothing.

Acid seeped into his stomach, burning, gnawing. This looked bad. Worse than bad. This had the makings of a catastrophe. If Miller, Jolliff, Hursey, and Gold had wound up like Zeklos…

He shook his head. What would he do? What
could
he do? Diana—had to get used to calling her the Oculus now—and the others would be looking to him for answers, and he had none. This isolated house on this spit of land bordering the Atlantic offered more safety that anyplace else they might have chosen, but it hamstrung them as well. Even if they had the manpower to answer Alarms, they were too far from just about anywhere of importance to act on them.