Sunfail (3 page)

Something was wrong.

People along the platform looked agitated.

There was a buzz moving through them like a swarm of angry bees. Jake checked out a couple of the guys closest to him as he passed them. There was an edge to them; they were tense. Up and down the platform he saw plenty of pale faces.

Shock?
That was his first thought.

Why?
That was his second.

He’d lived in the city long enough to know bad things happened. Who could forget that? This grim recollection led to a third thought, the bleakest of the three:
What’s going on up there?

He hadn’t heard any announcements over the public address system, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t happening. He’d been a long way down the tunnel. He could have missed the announcement, but surely the control center would have given him a situation report?

Anxiety is contagious. He knew that. He’d been in combat situations often enough to know that fear spread like wildfire, and once it was under your skin there was no shaking it.

He hurried toward the exit. A young guy in a hoodie with his hands stuffed into the pouch pocket passed through the turnstiles ahead of him. Jake caught his eye. “Hey, man, what’s going on?”

The man glanced up at him, startled, then saw the MTA logo on his orange vest and relaxed, trusting that down here he was one of the guys in charge. He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say. “Just came over the news—Fort Hamilton. It’s been hit.”

“What?” Jake stared at the stranger. That couldn’t be right. Hit? No way would anyone assault Fort Hamilton. That was insane. But he started to register fragments of the conversations going on around him and realized he was hearing the name Fort Hamilton over and over again.

“CNN had footage from their weather chopper, showed the smoke. Not much else. But the place is burning. Fucking terrorists.”

“Jesus . . .” Jake crossed himself, muscle memory rather than devotion. He now heard the beginning whisper-rumble of an oncoming train, then spotted the headlights approaching around the bend. He was still trying to process what he’d just heard. Fort Hamilton, gone? He couldn’t get his head around that. In some ways it was more shocking than the Twin Towers. The old base had been there almost two hundred years in one form or another. It was a core part of the nation’s defense, not some stockbroker’s castle of commerce. Despite occasional calls to close the last active base in New York City, it was still home to a whole slew of reserve and National Guard units, and the North Atlantic Division headquarters for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Jesus indeed.

A terror strike made a grim kind of sense, but to a man like him, trained in the turmoil of combat, a strike like that was never the endgame, it was just a move toward it. They—whoever
they
were—were cutting off an Army response to something else.

And then there was Sophie’s message out of the blue:
Something is about to happen.

Were the two related? They had to be, didn’t they? And if they were, what the hell was she caught up in?

Don’t look for me.

I’m not who you think I am.

He pushed his way against the flow of people rising up toward the street, and emerged into daylight, on some subconscious level expecting to see plumes of smoke. There were a lot of edgy people. He couldn’t see any of the fuck-with-one-of-us-you-fuck-with-all-of-us bravado the post–9/11 movies had propagated. Most of these people were frightened they were about to go through hell all over again. Life had changed a lot in the last decade or so, and often not for the better. The years brought distance with them and a feeling of
It couldn’t happen again
that was almost complacent. They’d willingly given up so many liberties to ensure it couldn’t.

But it
could
happen again, no matter what anyone believed.

There were enemies within and without, and as far as Jake could tell they didn’t need to be fundamentalists to want to see America humbled. That was the biggest change he’d recognized. He could still remember the anger he’d experienced firsthand when he rocked up to a bar in Paris during his leave. All he’d done was ask for a beer. The accent had been enough to earn a torrent of abuse about interference, being part of the world police, and other bullshit that made him turn around and walk right back out of the bar. He’d only wanted a fucking drink, not a lecture on the rights of man. It was worse than the crap he’d taken growing up because of his skin color. The world was black-and-white in so many different ways.

This wasn’t an accident.

He knew it.

Even without seeing the smoke, he knew it.

Fort Hamilton was a strategic target.

The part of Jake Carter that would always be a soldier processed things in a logical fashion. Stage one: threat assessment.
What were they facing? Who was the enemy here? What is their endgame?
Stage two: intervention.
Become an obstacle between the enemy and their goal.

He heard an old guy explaining to his daughter, “You hit Hamilton, you cripple the Army response to anything on land. Simple as that. Take out the tunnels and bridges and we’re an island of sitting ducks. It ain’t good, kid.” The words carried easily despite the wind and the traffic. Jake stepped away from the stairs and onto the sidewalk beside the subway entrance. “Smart move if you want to inflict maximum damage.” The guy was absolutely right.

Not far away, a young woman, an NYU student judging by her bohemian outfit and the hemp book bag slung over her shoulder, was a lot more alarmed. “What’s next? We have to get out of here. First they take out the Army and the National Guard, what’s next?” she wailed at her friend, clutching her arm tightly. Hysteria wasn’t going to help anyone, natural or not. “They’re gonna start herding us into little pens, like mice, and doing experiments on us! You watch! They hate us!”

He wanted to go over to her and explain that this was New York, not Auschwitz, and Josef Mengele was dead; if it was al-Qaeda they wouldn’t be interested in turning her into a lab rat—but he didn’t bother wasting his breath. Hell, he knew plenty of people who thought like that, and plenty more who’d argue that the Big Apple was already a major filth-ridden and rotten maze, complete with bits of cheese scattered throughout and a whole lot of panicked mice in business suits bouncing off each other every day of the fucking week.

Why Fort Hamilton?

If you were going to hit a major target, why not some place here in Midtown instead of down in Brooklyn?

He was getting ahead of himself.

He was thinking like it was a foregone conclusion that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the Ku Klux fucking Klan was behind the panic. He didn’t even know for sure what had happened, let alone who was behind it.

He thought about what the vet had said.

Which is when Jake realized that he was already working on stage two, figuring out the best way to put himself between the unknown enemy and their goals before he’d established who or what the threat was. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his fight anymore. Once a warrior, always a warrior.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE COULDN’T SEE ANYONE, BUT THAT DIDN’T MEAN there wasn’t anyone watching.

Getting out had been too easy. She wasn’t buying it. Too many years in combat situations and hot zones—and even more spent training others to cope with the demands of both—had drilled an almost preternatural awareness into Sophie Keane. She knew when she wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t just paranoia.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Paris was a
busy
city. Maybe not New York–busy, but it was always bustling with activity and beautiful people. The power brokers of commerce, big businesses, and big bank-balances dominated la Défense. Most of the people working in the neighborhood were inside, hidden away behind the anonymity of plate-glass windows. Even so, there were pedestrians, a mix of locals and tourists, cutting through the quieter streets on their way to livelier, more
Parisian
locations. Watching them was like seeing the physical laws of the universe played out on the streets. They moved in clusters, together or alone, everything at first seemingly random but ultimately following lines that provided order in the seeming chaos.

They weren’t what had her on edge. That was something else. Someone else. Someone actively looking for her.

She’d been made. It wasn’t like her to be sloppy.

She’d allowed herself to be spooked. And when spooked, she’d allowed herself to make mistakes. She’d been so fixated on just getting out of there that she’d forgotten the basics. She clenched her fist, painted nails digging into her palm. What’s done was done. Her paymasters would send their killers after her to clean up the mess she’d made. Now she had no choice but to work around them.

She was good at that.

She was a survivor.

She checked left and right without turning around. Left, she used the reflection in a shop window; right, a car’s passenger-side window. For behind, she used the windshield of a stalled Fiat stuck in the unmoving line of traffic. It was as if the entire street, everywhere around her, was filled with ghosts. They had no substance. Any one of them could have been watching her, but no one paid her obvious attention as she hit the sidewalk.

Sophie moved quickly down the boulevard. She didn’t rush, but her native New Yorker’s gait meant she moved with a purpose the Parisians didn’t share. It was all about acting like you belonged there, giving no indication that you’d done anything wrong. A young French man strolled past, smiled, and nodded at her during that split second where they occupied each other’s space, natural, flirtatious.

He was a good-looking kid and he knew it.

She offered a smile back. She didn’t want him remembering her as the woman who was immune to his charms.

A young couple skirted her, moving up quickly from behind and then splitting apart to go around her on either side only to come together again a few steps ahead. They moved with the familiarity of lovers, barely acknowledging her presence as they swept past.

A bike messenger rushed by, bag slapping against his left leg as he pedaled furiously, weaving in and out of stalled traffic with the same death wish of bike messengers the world over. The streets were eerie these days, with the lined-up cars going nowhere. It had been like that for a few days now. Ironically, that stillness was the first sign that things were in motion.

She could
feel
her tail closing the distance between them.

She could run, but that turned survival into a game of chance.

She didn’t know how fast her pursuer was, if they were working alone, or if a cordon was closing in around her.

She could run, but with no idea of who was chasing her she could never stop running. That was a problem.

La Défense wasn’t some Parisian ghetto. It was one of the city’s newer areas. It was less than sixty years old and had been revitalized in seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. Sidewalks were long and straight and clean with plenty of space for grass and flowers and low bushes between them and the buildings. The trees grew right along the edge of the avenues and boulevards, warring with the lines of cars for possession of the roads. The district was a wonderful place if modern living was your thing, but it was absolutely appalling for her current needs.

She scanned the area. Most of the buildings were new, functionalist, with wide, flat roofs. The architecture meant her hunter could have eyes up there too: a sniper with a high-powered rifle. They didn’t need to be running and leaping from rooftop to rooftop like some kind of parkour freak. A skilled shooter with a decent sniper rifle could take out a target from a mile away with the high ground—even maintain a good hit probability from a mile and a half. She was a sitting duck down there in the wide street. Sophie resisted the urge to check for a red dot in the middle of her chest. If it was there, then it was too late do anything about it. Fatalistic, but 100 percent accurate.

She couldn’t see anyone up there. That didn’t mean they weren’t there; the angles made it easy to hide. There was no telltale glint of sunlight on the sight to give them away. All she could do was keep moving.

Breathing slowly and steadily Sophie continued down the avenue. She had a finite time out here. She knew that. Her pursuer would grow tired of the game sooner rather than later and, if he was good, pick his moment to move in for the kill. She had to assume he was good. Better than her. That was the only way to stay alive. Underestimating the enemy was a good way to die young.

She needed to get off the street.

She scanned the rows of buildings and doorways as she moved, thinking how much easier it would have been a week ago to just jack one of the parked cars. It wasn’t an option now. Even if she could get one of the engines started she couldn’t move fast enough. The city was jammed hood to tail to hood. Any sudden moves would only escalate the problem faster than she wanted. She was already in enough trouble. She didn’t need the gendarmerie hunting her as well; The Hidden’s killers were more than enough to contend with.

She kept looking for another out.

A couple of minutes later, a possible solution moved toward her: a small gang of students, male and female, all walking together, all chatting loudly and gesturing wildly. Deep in conversation, laughing, arguing, with all the passion of youth trying to one-up each other as they impressed their way into whichever pair of pants it was they had their eyes on. A couple carried small canvases and sketchbooks. They were budding Space Invaders and Zevs or whoever the new cool street artist du jour happened to be, on their way down to Montmartre. They took up the entire sidewalk—and were heading right for her.

She could use them.

Through the trees and buildings opposite her, Sophie noticed a brightly lit lantern beside an open doorway, the stairs down into the metro barely visible beyond the threshold.