Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  “Well, apparently they weren’t using both, because they didn’t see her blood trackers suddenly went to Tennessee. Why’s that?”

  Scott looks him right in the eye. “They’re not our best people. These are the guys who are supposed to hang out in restaurants and bars and eavesdrop and file a report if they hear any interesting gossip.”

  “Thank you, Ed Baker,” Fred says quietly. “Wild guess is her cell phone surveillance has gone dark, too.”

  “Digital service just confirmed that’s a yes,” Scott says.

  Fred says, “So we’re being hacked? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “We’re not being hacked,” Cole says, “technically speaking.”

  Scott says, “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “The call is coming from inside the house, gentlemen,” Cole says. “What? Nobody here likes horror movies?”

  “My job’s scary enough, thanks,” Fred says.

  At least he didn’t say my boss, Cole thinks.

  “Launch the microdrones,” Cole says with a sigh.

  “They’re useless at night,” Scott says.

  “They’re not useless. They just don’t have night vision, which means they’re harder to navigate, especially when there’s tall buildings around. We’re not in Seattle anymore. Follow light sources. Stay in the valley. Avoid the mountains. Sweep Altamira until we find her Volvo.”

  “What if she left town?” Fred asks.

  “Then we’ll catch up with her when she comes back. In the meantime, this amazing crack-shot ground team who didn’t notice her leave, how many are there?”

  “Four.”

  “They each have a vehicle?”

  “Pretty basic, but yeah.”

  “Send one to the 101 off-ramp now. Put another one at the intersection of their street with the mountain road.”

  “What do you want them to do?” Scott asks.

  “Notify us if she comes back, and never look me in the eye again.”

  “What if she’s not coming back?” Fred asks.

  “This isn’t a jailbreak. She just went somewhere and she didn’t want us to know. That’s all.”

  “So she’s the one who hacked us?” Fred asks.

  Cole says, “Somebody get me a satellite phone. Now.”

  “How bad is it?” Charley asks.

  The traffic heading south on the 101 is much lighter, probably because she’s leaving the necklace of communities south of Salinas in her wake.

  “So he did tell you there was good security?” Bailey asks.

  “He said nobody was safer anywhere.”

  “That’s . . . not an accurate description. I’ve been scanning the personnel files of the people he’s got in town. Only one has military experience; the rest are just lackeys who file written reports about the gossip at the Copper Pot that are putting me to sleep right now. They’ve got a microdrone crew that’s in a mobile van, but I seriously doubt any of those nerds are skilled at hand-to-hand combat. And there’s something called the Med Ranch—”

  “I know that. I’m supposed to go straight there if I have a stomachache or my arm suddenly falls off.”

  “OK,” Bailey says.

  “So they’re just watching us? They can’t do anything if something bad happens?”

  “It doesn’t look like it, no. So, um, this security threat? The one he didn’t want me to know about? How bad is it?”

  “Oh, that old thing? Yeah, your brother just found a domestic terrorist network that’s setting up shop in our backyard. That’s all. Oh, also, the woman who gave us the flash drive proving all of it has been missing for two days.”

  “So like by backyard, do you mean, like, the backyard of your house, or are you referring to—”

  “That’s just not funny right now, Bailey.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. OK. Well, I’m seeing emails from the local security director there that look like he’s reassigning people. Fast. It’s a lot of code words I don’t understand, but it’s also travel instructions and arrival times. But . . . none of these guys are going to be there until tomorrow. They’re coming from different parts of the world.”

  In her mind’s eye, she sees Luke’s house—their house—an island of light amid the dark sloping lawns, in a neighborhood with wide, grassy lots. A peaceful, quiet neighborhood on the lower flank of a mountain. Or a lonely one, depending on your point of view. Only now can she appreciate the extent to which her mind ran wild with Cole’s comforting words—safer than anyone anywhere! She imagined cameras in the trees, snipers in the bushes, vans full of mercenaries always on the ready nearby. Scary if you’re plotting an escape, comforting if your boyfriend’s making trouble with possible terrorists. But apparently there’s nothing of the kind anywhere in town, and now she feels as if they’ve all spent the last twenty-four hours, Luke included, acting with reckless confidence against a vicious menace in their own backyard.

  Because, after all, if Jordy Clements is who they think he is, he won’t see Luke as anything other than a small-town sheriff’s deputy with a big mouth. And it’s possible Jordy’s already made one troublemaker disappear.

  There’s a half-empty bottle of water in one of the cup holders. Before she can stop to wonder if the lid’s been closed tightly enough to keep out bacteria, she uncaps it. Without looking, she reaches into the Ziploc bag and pulls out a pill as if it were just an aspirin. It’s on her tongue when she hears a strange chirping from Bailey’s end of the line. It sounds like a ringing phone, but not quite.

  “Uh-oh,” Bailey says.

  One swig of water, down the hatch.

  Decision made.

  No second thoughts.

  She’d hoped the fear would evaporate, but it hasn’t. Now she’s full of the very real fear that comes with responsibility. If something goes bad in Altamira tonight, she’ll have to be the one to stop it.

  “Guess who this is,” Bailey says.

  “Cole?”

  “Calling on our private line.”

  “What happens if you don’t take it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he kicks me out of his system.”

  “Can he?”

  “I could probably make my way back in. But I’d be at war with his digital services team, and that would take some time.”

  “Can you find out if he’s actually doing anything to investigate Jordy Clements? Maybe he’s found something bad, and that’s why he’s reassigning people.”

  “Who won’t be there until tomorrow morning,” Bailey says. “So Jordy’s a terrorist maybe?”

  “The ringleader, maybe.”

  “I better take this,” he says.

  “Sure.”

  She fights the urge to close her eyes, just so she can think. But then she might end up having to think about what to do now that she’s driven off the road.

  Either Cole flat-out lied about their security situation, or he was too lazy or distracted to know the facts. Both prospects are terrifying.

  And in another few minutes, Bailey, the closest they have on the inside of a system that’s failing to protect them, might get kicked out of the network.

  To say nothing of the terrorists in their backyard.

  Not bad for a Sunday night in a small town.

  She dials Luke’s cell.

  Charley likes to leave all the lights on when they go out, so Luke’s not surprised when he comes home to find they’re all burning, even though her station wagon’s gone. But when the burglar alarm only lets out a weak two-tone chime as he opens the front door, he stops in his tracks.

  The lights are one thing; the burglar alarm’s another. She likes that extra layer of security. So does he. And if she’d set it before she left, the thing would be squealing holy hell right now until he punched in the code.

  He checks the panel, scans the log. Every time he spends more than a few seconds futzing with the system, he remembers how Bailey used it to first make contact with them months before. And Bailey’s the last thing he
wants to be thinking about right now.

  Apparently Charley left a little over an hour ago, long after he went to the station.

  So she just walked out the front door and didn’t set the alarm?

  He’s getting ready to call her when his cell phone rings; it’s her.

  “Hey, where are you?” he asks.

  “So lots of news to discuss. Are you at the station? I should come there.”

  In the kitchen, he undoes his gun belt, sets it on the counter. “No, I just got home. Hey, why didn’t you set the alarm? I mean, not like it matters with Cole’s people all over. Still, it’s probably not a bad idea to have an extra layer of—”

  “Luke, stop. They’re not all over. That’s just it. We need to talk. In person.”

  There’s a cold breeze on the back of his neck. He turns. The window above the sink is halfway open. More than halfway open. He’s moving to it when the darkness just beyond it lurches toward him. There’s a sharp, high-pitched buzz, then a fiery bloom of pain erupts in the center of his chest. The shock of it sends him skittering backward, reaching for the edge of the counter nearby. His hand misses, and he hits the floor ass-first.

  He’s screaming Charley’s name, but his voice sounds far away, and he sees his phone spinning away from him across the linoleum. Maybe it’s shock. But it’s not a bullet that struck him. It’s something small, and it’s somehow coating his throat and his arms with a sensation that combines hot and cold.

  The words coming from him are hopelessly mangled. Charldontcum DontcomeCharley . . . Chaurrrlleee. Then it feels as if all his bones have been swiftly and effortlessly removed from his body. Having lost control of his limbs, his upper body hits the floor, vaguely aware the final impact should have hurt more than it did.

  Poisoned, he realizes.

  Everything around him goes dark.

  At first, he thinks he’s losing consciousness. But there’s a shrill, insistent beeping in the darkness, the sound the burglar alarm makes when a power failure forces it to use its reserve battery.

  Someone’s cut power to the house.

  Then there are other sounds: the front door opening, footsteps—heavy, but moving swiftly and determinedly. Inside, he’s screaming, but whatever the dart was tipped with has paralyzed him. He tries to shout, hears only a snotty gurgle in one nostril.

  There are shadows over him. Two, he thinks. One’s so tall and broad, he wonders if he’s imagining it. They lift him by his shoulders and limp ankles as if he weighs nothing. As if all of this is normal, routine. He can’t feel the material that’s suddenly being pulled up around him. Only when he sees it closing over him does he realize it’s some sort of bag. The sound he hears next is so ordinary, in another circumstance, he might laugh. A zipper. He’s being zipped inside of a bag the size of a human body. The size of his body.

  Blinded, his limbs useless, he’s hoisted up into the air. It should hurt, but it doesn’t. His body’s numb; his eyes feel hot and wet. There are tears coming from his eyes he can’t blink away.

  Then a siren starts to scream, and the men carrying him jump with surprise.

  It’s the burglar alarm.

  Whoever these men are—Jordy’s? Cole’s?—they cut the power to the house, but someone managed to set off the alarm regardless. There’s only one person he knows who might be able to do that.

  Bailey, Luke thinks, and then darkness takes him.

  When the top of the steering wheel cracks in her grip, Charlotte realizes she’s been triggered.

  She’s been screaming Luke’s name ever since he started crying out to her in that horrible garbled voice, and now, the sensation she hasn’t felt since she jammed one foot into Richard Davies’s bear trap is back, up and down her body. Bone music.

  She hasn’t broken the steering wheel entirely. She can still drive, thank God.

  She widens her grip, sucks in the kind of deep breaths required to focus Zypraxon’s power so she can perform ordinary actions.

  Thread the needle, thread the needle.

  Then she realizes her foot’s pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. She’s been doing 120 ever since hell broke out on the other end of the phone.

  A flurry of texts from Bailey have lit up her phone’s display. GO TO HOUSE NOW. ATTACK. SOMEONE’S TAKING LUKE.

  The Pearson Road exit’s within sight.

  She accelerates.

  38

  She meant to open the car door like a normal person, but when it goes flying across the sidewalk and the man and the woman who were just running toward her Volvo start backing away in terror, she realizes she failed.

  Both people on the sidewalk look vaguely familiar. She’s seen them around town, trying to blend in while they casually study everyone and everything. The woman wears a baby doll dress and a blue-jean jacket; the man, acid-washed jeans and a baggy polo. So when they both pull matching Glocks on her at the same time, the effect is jarring, like two everyday humans revealing their lizard-like alien faces.

  When she starts walking toward them, their eyes get wide. Their gun hands shake.

  “Where is he?” she says.

  In a trembling voice, the woman says, “Ms. Rowe, please, if you just calm down we can—”

  Charlotte keeps walking toward them. “We’re past that. Where’s Luke?”

  The man in the polo shirt’s apparently looking for a promotion. He takes up a post in front of the half-open front gate, raises his gun so that it’s aimed directly at her chest. “The rest of the team’s on its way. We’re handling it. You need to—”

  “Team? There’s no goddamn team. You’re it, and someone got to Luke, didn’t they?”

  “Mr. Graydon will be here any minute and then—”

  She closes her fist around the barrel of his gun. He doesn’t have the courage to fire. It wouldn’t matter if he did.

  “Nobody’s coming who has what I have.” She crushes the gun barrel in one fist, then tugs the resulting misshapen mass from his hand and tosses it to the sidewalk.

  “Move.”

  He obeys.

  The house is dark. The alarm system’s sounding out two different alerts: one that says it was recently triggered, another that says it’s operating off reserve battery. Someone cut power to the house, and just this house. The neighbor’s lights were on when she pulled up.

  Unfamiliar male shouts come from the guest bedroom, the one where she sometimes sleeps when Luke’s snoring keeps her awake. The memory of Luke’s snores, of his sleeping, peaceful profile, are hot pokers prodding the flames of rage in her chest.

  Brief flashes of light come from the same room—the erratic jerks of a flashlight.

  It’s two voices, she realizes. One’s shouting questions; the other’s chanting the same thing over and over again. The chant sounds like a Bible verse, and the guy giving it sounds remarkably peaceful and content. But his words run together, as if he doesn’t really care if anyone hears aside from his crazy idea of a god.

  Slowly, she reaches out and gently presses the door open. Like the guards out front, she vaguely recognizes both men from around town: the one down on his knees is from the Clements tunnel crew; the one holding a gun on him is a plainclothes spy like the two out front. Jordy’s guy is a stout fireplug of a man, but right now his nose is bleeding and the flashlight the security guard’s shining down on him from above gives his face a misshapen cast. He rocks back and forth on his knees.

  “Where? Where were they going?” the man standing over him screams.

  This desperate interrogation is the best these idiots can do. And they’ve dragged the guy back inside the house because their primary concern is what the neighbors might think.

  When the terrified guard sees Charley standing in the doorway, he shines the flashlight in her direction.

  “Ms. Rowe, you need to leave immediately.” There’s a breathless tremor in his voice. Like the folks outside, he’s terrified and overwhelmed and not cut out for this. “Ms. Rowe, please, go wait outsid
e. The rest of the team is coming.”

  “There is no rest of the team,” she says.

  “Ms. Rowe, please, when Mr. Graydon gets here, we’ll regroup and figure out what—”

  “Who is he?”

  “He was the lookout. We caught him. The others . . . the others got away.”

  “Luke?”

  He doesn’t answer, doesn’t even shake his head.

  “Did they get away with Luke?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  Charlotte punches her fist through the wall next to her. The sound’s loud enough to stop their captive’s prayer. His eyes open, and along with the security guard standing over him, he watches Charley gently remove her forearm and fist from the deep hole. She extends her hand in front of her, opens it, and releases chunks of drywall onto the floor. Then she twirls her fingers so they can see her hand’s in great shape.

  “Give me the flashlight,” she says.

  His hand shaking, the guard extends the flashlight, leaning forward onto one foot, as if he’s afraid of her gravitational pull. She takes it from him gently, then shines it in their captive’s face. His expression is a fixed mask.

  “Get out of here,” she tells the security guard.

  Practically falling over his feet, he complies.

  “Where is my boyfriend?” Charlotte asks.

  The captive doesn’t answer.

  She gives the open door behind her a gentle kick with one heel; it slams shut with enough force to shake the walls. The man before her flinches, squints into the flashlight, but he still doesn’t answer.

  “You work for Jordy Clements?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer, so she sinks down to the floor, onto her knees, flashlight angled at him.

  “I asked you a question. Two questions, actually. Why aren’t you answering me?”

  She balls her free hand into a fist, slams one side of it against the floor. The center of the indentation buckles the wood, sends out a jellyfish of cracks. His jaw tenses and he shakes his head slightly, as if he’s denying what his eyes are telling him.

  Then he leaps to his feet, bolting past her.