Midnight Fire

  “Yeah.” Jack scrabbled for his jeans. “Sarin’s no joke.”

  “No. I mean the bombing.”

  “Wait.” Jack froze. His eyes met Summer’s, she’d followed him into the bedroom. She sensed something. “What is this about Summer’s apartment?”

  “Shit,” Joe swore. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. That Nick didn’t call you.”

  “Fuck.” Jack had done the unthinkable last night. He’d toned down his cell ring so that if someone called in the middle of the night it wouldn’t wake Summer. And then he’d fallen into a sex-induced coma and had missed a call. This was unforgiveable. “I didn’t get the call. I’ll ping Nick right now. So what happened?”

  Summer was close by him, a hand on his arm. He put his hand over hers, watched her eyes.

  “Her apartment was blown up around 4:00 a.m. Nick will tell you about it. Right now the best guess is a grenade launcher. The place looks like Beirut, man. Nick showed me pictures.”

  “Fuck.” Summer was clutching his arm, staring up at him wide-eyed. “Talk to you from the plane then,” he told Joe and thumbed off.

  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 sche
duled 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.”