The Drafter

  Howard abruptly jerked the van to the right, wheeling into an abandoned tire place and lurching to a halt. Weeds were thick at the edges, and a gully sank behind the building, rising to more weeds. About a half mile back, a big-box store glowed in the mist. Shocked, Peri stared at him. “Come on,” he said as he snatched up his coat. “We’re going to have to walk.”

  Her relief was so thick, she could almost taste it. He wasn’t abandoning her. “You believe me?” she said as she scanned the van for anything useful.

  He was already outside, taking his lab coat off to show his brown slacks and a knitted vest over a stark white shirt. All he needed was a bow tie. Squinting at the mist, he shrugged his coat on and pulled his collar up, clearly disliking the rain. “Believe you? No, but Silas trusted you. We’ll go through the empty lot and pick up a bus at the superstore. We’re skipping the safe house and going straight to the alliance. Someone else is going to have to decide what to do with you. I’m done.”

  He slammed the door shut. She didn’t have time to search the van for anything to help their flight, so she got out and hustled to catch up. His back was bowed, and his office shoes were already wet and muddy. “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it, but he never met her eyes even as he helped her down the ravine and across the shallow ditch of water.

  It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Peri stood sideways in the bus’s aisle, two bags of food in her hand as she waited for the heavyset woman ahead of her to finish draping her coat over her seat back and sit down. It was after midnight, and the chartered bus full of overdressed, excited women had finally settled as the complimentary wine and late hour took their toll. She’d jumped at the chance to make a food run when the BING bus had pulled off the interstate for a fifteen-minute comfort break. The choice had been tacos, burgers, or subs. The subs won, hands down.

  Finally the woman put her butt in the seat and Peri edged past. It felt good to get up and move around, but Howard had been sleeping when she’d left, and she wasn’t sure how he’d handle waking up and finding her gone.

  The bus jerked into motion, and she easily caught her balance. Sure enough, she spotted Howard’s horrified expression in the shifting streetlights. Their eyes met and she held up the bags of food in explanation. Relief cascaded over him, quickly followed by guilt.

  Swaying with the motion of the bus, she continued past several rows of open, plush seats to get to where they’d retreated to try to distance themselves from the tour group.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got you a steak hoagie on whole wheat,” she said as she sat, her voice betraying her slight annoyance.

  Eyes wide, he shifted in the indulgent seat to tuck his phone away. “I thought you’d left.”

  She extended him a bag, arm stiff. “I asked for your help, remember?”

  Sheepish, he took it, bag crackling as he opened it up and looked inside. “That was before my cover was blown. Thanks.”

  “Bottled water . . .” She handed him one that had been tucked under her arm, and he took it, closing out the complimentary Web link and lowering his tray table. “And your choice.” She opened her bag and brought out the chips. “Salt and vinegar, or black pepper.”

  Howard smiled weakly, his face seeming to vanish as the bus lurched onto the service road and into a more certain dark. “Black pepper?” he asked, and she handed it over.

  That he hadn’t trusted her rankled, and Peri sat silent beside him at the back of the bus, lips pressed as she arranged her sandwich and chips on the fold-down table. She left the courtesy light off, but the ambient light from the monitors, currently muted and showing the late news, was enough to see his continued embarrassment. Apparently Asia’s borders were closed, anyone trying to break the containment being shot on sight and dragged away by workers in hazmat suits. Peri thought it disturbing that no one seemed to care. Perhaps it was an ongoing thing she’d forgotten. She hadn’t been able to find any Twinkies the last couple of days, either.

  “I left you a note,” she finally said, and he winced.

  “I didn’t see it,” he said, clearly lying. “Thank you for the sandwich.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said drily, the snap of the breaking seal on her water sounding loud.

  Howard seemed to shrink in on himself. “I’m sorry,” he started, and she cut him off, hand waving as she swallowed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said when she came up for air. “I’m the bad guy, remember?”

  “I never—” he said in affront, and she eyed him sharply as she recapped her bottle. “Fine, maybe I did,” he amended, looking at his sandwich forlornly. “But can you blame me?”

  “Eat your steak, Howard,” she said flatly.

  Immediately he picked it up. “Opti is a mercenary task force,” he said around his full mouth. “The only thing keeping them from being classified as a terrorist group is that they’re on the government’s payroll.” He swallowed. “Among others.”

  “I’m taking my black-pepper chips back,” she said, plucking them from his tray.

  Howard chuckled, dark hands securely wrapped around his hoagie. “You do what you need to do, but you can’t tell me that Opti didn’t help that power plant melt down in the Middle East last year.”

  “Why on earth would Opti blow up a power plant?” she asked, her voice hardly audible over the bus, roaring to get up the entrance ramp. The bus darkened further, cocooning them.

  “To put an end to the religious extremists slaughtering reporters and medical relief workers.” Hardly more than a shadow, Howard hunched over his tray as his sandwich threatened to fall apart. “Millions displaced, thousands dead. Acres of newly arable land wasted. It’s a shame. The world lost a lot of history, too. Only so much of it could be trucked out ahead of time under the excuse of lending it to a museum.”

  She didn’t remember, and for the first time, it bothered her. “Accidents do happen.”

  Howard’s dark fingers stood out against his hoagie as her eyes adjusted, and he set his sandwich down. “They’ve done it before. Chernobyl ring a bell?”

  Peri frowned and broke a piece of bacon off her BLT. “You’re mistaken.”

  “Am I?”

  The salty bacon tasted flat. Again, doubt trickled through her, her blind loyalty wearing thin. “What about Opti breaking up that credit card–strip hacker ring? Millions of dollars caught before it was funneled overseas. And Stanza-gate. You really think that wack job should set policy? How about finding that plane that went down in the Alps? Rescuing all those people before they started eating each other.”

  Howard’s brow furrowed in thought. “That was three years ago.”

  “Well, it seems like yesterday to me,” she said defensively, and Howard adroitly snatched his chips back, his faint look of pity-laced understanding irritating her.

  Opening the packet, he leaned close. “I hate to break it to you, but the strip fraud was a front, paid for by the Billion by Thirty club to force that nifty new banking app on your phone into play. Opti found the Alps plane because they were the ones who downed it trying to keep a defector from going over to the wrong side. I’ll give you Stanza-gate, though. The guy was crazy.”

  “Yeah, we should just let the world go to hell,” she grumbled. “Free choice and all.”

  “That’s not what this is about.” He hesitated, the lights from the oncoming traffic making the furrows on his brow look deep. “Okay, the alliance is trying to shut Opti down, but not the work that drafters and anchors do. We need the terrorists stopped, the flesh-trafficking rings ended, and the power-hungry extremist governments held in check. And sure, the alliance isn’t so much the green tree-huggers that we don’t understand why sometimes it’s better if someone dies early or innocents suffer for the greater good. What the alliance believes is that it shouldn’t be a handful of wealthy families who both dictate and benefit, telling the rest of humanity that they did them a favor and to be happy
with their new toys and don’t ask who paid for them and how.”

  Peri pushed her food away, her appetite gone. She wasn’t so innocent as to believe that there was a right or wrong answer, either. But Opti had rescued that plane. They had saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And murdered a politician before he could strong-arm a series of laws into legislation that would set the U.S. back a hundred years.

  But even she had a problem if the real benefit Opti was serving might be only the interests of those who could pay for the miracle of changing time.

  “Jesus, Howard, how did you ever get mixed up in this?” she said softly, not really expecting an answer.

  Digging to the bottom of his chip bag, Howard chuckled. “A woman.”

  “See a man in trouble, look no farther than the woman beside him,” she said, saluting him with her water bottle.

  “No. It was Silas,” Howard added as he shook the crumbs from his chip bag into his palm. “I was a tutor in college, and I met Silas when he came over to pick up one of my clients. We found we liked the same football team, started hanging out, watching the games. He got drunk one night, staggering drunk over a girl I’d never heard him talk about before. I took him home.” Howard crumpled the chip bag and threw it away. “The entire ride he debated with himself the moral responsibilities of how much someone should sacrifice for their beliefs and the responsibility of those who love them. He told me this fantastic story about what if people could jump back a few seconds and rewrite a mistake but in the doing, forgot it.”

  Peri met his eyes, glad it was dark. “Drafters.”

  He pushed his crumbs into a tiny pile. “I found out about anchors and drafters. Found out that Opti was a for-hire service. The rich get richer, the poor get cheese off a truck. The alliance was my chance to be more than I am, I suppose. Put my actions where my mouth is. You don’t always have to have a reason other than the need to do what’s right. And it was exciting to know that there really are people who can do what you do and to be a part of that.” He shrugged. “Why does anyone do anything?”

  A smile crossed Peri’s face. Why indeed?

  “How about you?” Howard asked, and she reached to pluck a chip off his starched white shirt.

  “I fell off a swing,” she said, not wanting to talk about it. “Would you mind if I sat across the aisle to catch a few z’s?”

  “No, go on,” he said, gaze falling to her untouched sandwich. “Are you going to eat that?”

  She shook her head, smiling as he shifted it to his tray. “Wake me up before we get there, okay?” she asked, and when he nodded, she took her water and moved to the other side of the bus.

  The seat was cool as she settled into it, but it wasn’t the temperature or the cold window she rested her head upon that made her shiver. Eyes open, she stared at the passing lights, her mind full as she weighed the last couple of days against what she’d known her entire adult life. She wasn’t sure if remembering those three missing years would make any difference.

  Opti was both more and less than she had thought: more involved and insidious than she had believed, and less moral and transparent than she had ever imagined. The alliance couldn’t be as ineffective and laughable as she had been told—not if it attracted people like Howard, people risking their lives not for revenge or money, but because it was the right thing to do.

  Peri shivered again, pressed against the side of the cold bus.

  She couldn’t believe Opti was entirely corrupt—because if it was, it meant she was, too.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Peri stepped off the charter bus, the ugly blue coat over her arm as she blinked in the clear, early sun. Howard was tight behind her, almost running into her as he took her elbow and edged her out of the way of the excited passengers. Eyes closed, she took a deep breath to push out the lingering, mild paranoia of being trapped in a bus with women who did not shut up.

  Silas was being lied to about her, and that bothered her more than she’d like to admit. Exhaling, she opened her eyes. People dressed with an overdone flair mingled with those in jeans and tees in a noisy throng, all walking the paved path to Churchill Downs. The track was closed for the season, but the venue could apparently still be rented out, and Peri squinted at the woman on the blond horse welcoming everyone to the Run for the Hearts charity race.

  An announcer blared over the noise of the leaving bus, and the woman wheeled her horse around, making it prance in place as the crowd before her cheered. A small jet roared nearby in takeoff, and Peri noted it. Not far away. Not far at all. Mid-sky, several low-Q news drones hummed over the track getting footage, and she lowered her head as one buzzed the parking lot for a shot of the arriving fans. Black cars lined the shade at the outskirts of the lot, their drivers catching a smoke or clustered around tablets. Most of the vehicles were late-model—probably rentals with drivers—but there were enough real cars to make her run a hand over her rumpled sweater. She’d fit in better with a big hat and jewelry. Black pearls, she thought, not knowing why. It was an odd mix of wealth and commonality bound together by the love of horses. That Howard’s contact was among the throng wasn’t encouraging.

  “That way.” Howard pointed to a narrow sawdust path that led away from the track, and she pushed herself into motion, relishing the chance to move. A flicker of mistrust rose as they passed the sign stating they were headed for the platinum campsites, but her gut said Howard was being honest with her. His mood had softened this morning, and she had the growing suspicion that he felt she needed rescuing.

  “It’s up on the right,” Howard said, head down over his phone as three girls in skirts too short and heels too tall passed them going the other way. “It’s about time she answered my text.”

  “Gawwd,” one of the girls drawled. “Did you see her black eye?”

  Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Giving her hair a fluff, she lifted her chin. It is what it is.

  Howard’s pace slowed as they entered the campsites and he began casting about. Huge RVs were spaced haphazardly under old trees. A number of them had golf carts parked in front. Others had tents with alfresco eating more lavish than most restaurants offered inside. There was a permanent pool and spa, and horses were clearly welcome, judging by the number of places available to tie them up or water them down. Millionaires camping out. Go figure.

  “There,” he said, exhaling in relief, and Peri followed his pointing finger to one of the more elaborate campsites under a banner reading JACQUARD EQUINES. A blond woman in a black evening dress sat in the cabana-like lounge area, her laptop and tablet open and in use. An overdone silk derby hat crowned by a veil and an enormous magnolia blossom rested on the table beside an untouched julep, unnoticed as she talked on her glass phone. But it was the multiple dishes on the roof of the RV that captured Peri’s attention. This was the alliance? She’d been expecting something backroom and slick with sunglass-wearing security. This felt like home.

  Seeing them, the woman stood, her conversation continuing as she came forward. She moved confidently, smoothing her long blond hair, which had been mussed by the hat. Peri eyed her low-heeled sandals in approval—stylish but still good to run in. Her dress was modestly high at the bodice, but it clung to accentuate her femininity. Even her jewelry was perfect, simple enough to keep her from sliding into the ranks of partygoers but saying “money” nonetheless. It was clearly a cultivated look, both elegant and in charge.

  “Hi, can I help you?” she said with a slight drawl, phone call ending as her gaze ran over Peri before returning to Howard. And then her eyes widened. “Oh. My. Gawd! Howard!” she exclaimed, her southern drawl strengthening. “I haven’t seen you since my freshman year!”

  “Taf.” Howard grinned, grunting in surprise when she yanked him into an enthusiastic hug. Her hair shifted to show a butterfly tattoo, and then she pushed back, beaming. “Wow, you look fabulous. I should have changed my major. How’s life been treating you?”

  “Great! I work for one
of the big hospitals planning their events. I’m using up all my vacation days to help my mom out on this, but God help her, she needed it. How about you? You got your license, right? I bet you’re why my mom is in such a state. Lord love a duck, you know better than to bother her when she’s fund-raising.”

  “Yeah. About that.” Flushed, Howard dropped back, his eyes darting to Peri to include her. “Taf, I’d like you to meet Peri Reed. Peri, this is Taf Jacquard. We met at school. I was pre-med. I think Taf was going for her MRS degree. How many majors did you have, anyway?”

  MRS degree, as in Mrs. . . . Peri took the woman’s hand, surprised at how firm it was.

  “Just one,” Taf said, giving him a mock punch as she let go of Peri. “I’m a marketing events coordinator, which means I can plan one hell of a party for six or sixty thousand. Nice to meet you. It’s Taffeta, actually, but call me Taf.”

  “Pleasure,” Peri said, forcing her smile to stay undimmed as Taf checked out her scuffed boots, wrinkled slacks, and ugly coat. At least she didn’t say anything about her black eye.

  “Is your mom around?” Howard asked, fidgeting. “She’s expecting us. I think.”

  “Sure. Come on up and sit down,” Taf said, and then louder to the aide hovering near the cabana, “Find out where my mom is, will you?” The aide murmured something, and Taf barked, “Then text her! The woman has her phone grafted to her ass.” All smiles, Taf turned back to them. “You want something to drink? It might take a minute. She’s got an entire group flying in from LA, and she’s trying to cram in as much as she can before they get here.”

  Peri eyed the cabana in anticipation, but before they could move, Taf sighed at the sound of hoofbeats. “Speak of the devil and she will appear,” she said, a tired resolve in her voice. Peri caught a flash of irritation on the young woman’s face, and then it was gone.

  “Hoo . . . boy.” Howard backed up when an arch-necked, light-blond mare high-stepped into the campsite. “I really don’t like horses.”