Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

  Not looking over, Pauly said, “Must be your lucky day.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SOMETHING WAS MISSING WITH THE sex. Like that Chinese-food thing, gulping down a five-course meal, ten minutes later he was famished. His body yearning for nourishment.

  Or maybe Nicole had just revved up Sheffield’s appetite so high, now he was hungry all the time. He couldn’t tell. And sure as hell didn’t want to believe anything was wrong. Didn’t want to analyze and overthink the whole thing and destroy it.

  Probably it was just his own free-floating doubt, not sure what a smart, attractive lady such as her found so appealing about a man nearly twice her age, a man who had just huffed toward the finish line of yet another romp.

  Lolling side by side in the mangled sheets, they stared up at the ceiling.

  It was Saturday, early afternoon. The beach in full weekend roar. Fifty yards away on the wide stretch of white sand, competing music blared. Rap, rock, salsa. Laughter, the rolling crash of surf. Out his window he could see some idiot throwing bread up into a screaming cyclone of gulls.

  “You need to paint something up there.” Nicole pointed at the white plaster. “Clouds or stars or the moon.”

  “On the ceiling?”

  “Or maybe a mirror.”

  “You find my ceiling boring?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But it wouldn’t hurt to jazz it up.”

  “I’m pretty jazzed up as it is. I think I just topped my personal best.”

  “You keep records on your sexual exploits?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, great. Are we about to have the sexual-history conversation? Compare our lifetime totals?”

  “You mean I’m not your first?”

  “What matters, Frank, is being the last.”

  He liked that. Something to shoot for. The one that didn’t get away.

  More staring at the ceiling.

  “A mirror would be nice,” he said. “I could see all your angles at once.”

  “I like to think I’ve got more angles than that.”

  “Oh, really? Angles I haven’t seen?”

  “Angles nobody’s seen.”

  “You going to show me? Or they off-limits?”

  “This is why I don’t like postcoital conversations.”

  “All our conversations are postcoital.”

  Droning overhead, one of those slow-moving planes hauling a banner.

  “A mirror up there, I’d always be worried it’d come crashing down.”

  “You worry about things like that, Frank? You have anxiety issues I should know about?”

  “I’ve made a pretty good career out of worrying.”

  “Maybe we should just lie here and be quiet.”

  “What’d you mean about the angles?”

  “See, that’s what I’m talking about. Frank-the-interrogator, can’t shut it off, got to keep digging. We should just shut up till the rush subsides and we’re normal again. Right now we’re too naked. We shouldn’t talk.”

  Can you be too naked? Frank wanted to say, but didn’t.

  He was silent, staring at the white ceiling. Wondering what they’d just been talking about. How it had turned testy so fast. Trying to run it back, hear it again, tease out the hidden messages. But he was too fuzzy-headed, too mellow. But still, something was off. Something he couldn’t name, didn’t want to name. If he could only shut down that part of his brain, the part that was always itching to go one layer deeper, peel the onion all the way to the pearl, he’d be a happier guy. A different guy, too. Dumber, but happier.

  They napped for a while. Frank woke and watched her sleeping. Then lay back and went away for half an hour. A lazy Saturday.

  When he woke again, she was in the tiny living room watching tennis on his TV. Wearing one of his T-shirts, an old, paint-spattered one he’d picked up in Cabo San Lucas years ago.

  He stood in the doorway and watched. It was some tennis match. Two blond banshees screaming when they hammered the ball, two different shrieks. One a two-part who-hoo and the other more like an orgasmic wail.

  He went back into the bedroom, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The bureau drawer was still open from Nicole’s helping herself. She hadn’t asked where he kept his T-shirts. She must’ve looked through his drawers till she found the one she was wearing. Making herself right at home at the Silver Sands, room 106. Which Frank didn’t mind at all.

  “You a tennis fan?”

  “It’s the channel that was on.”

  “Play any sports?”

  “StairMaster. Is that a sport?”

  “If it makes you sweat, I think it qualifies.”

  “Well, if that’s all it takes, then August in Miami, standing around in the shade, that’s an Olympic event.”

  She looked back at him and gave him a smile.

  “Something I wanted to show you,” he said.

  “Oh, good. I was afraid I’d seen everything you have.”

  Frank retrieved his briefcase from the bedroom, laid it on the coffee table, and dug out a manila folder.

  “Couldn’t get NSA to cooperate with satellite imagery, and Miami PD wanted too much for their drone. Anyway, that fricking thing is so loud they’d hear it coming a mile away. So one of my guys, Sanford, he’s got his own Cessna, he did a flyover yesterday. Slid these under the door this morning while we were otherwise engaged.”

  Frank laid the stack of photos out on the console seat, dealt the top one.

  Four black kayaks trailed a white fishing skiff, Prince Key’s eastern coastline visible at the edge of the shot.

  “Four guys and someone in a floppy hat driving the flats boat.”

  “So?”

  Frank put that one on the bottom of the stack and held up the next.

  The island itself from about two or three hundred feet.

  “Sanford came in lower than I wanted. Not far over the trees.”

  “It’s out of focus.”

  “The other ones are better.”

  They looked through the rest of the shots. One small tent was on the island, and a much larger one, a single solar panel, and other structures.

  “Looks like an obstacle course,” Frank said. “Like they’re training for something. A wall, a balance beam, old tires for agility drills.”

  She was silent.

  “And the kayaks, that’s interesting.”

  “What about them?”

  “You ever seen a black kayak?”

  “Why? Is that unusual?”

  “I’d say so,” he said. “Normally they’re bright red, yellow, orange, colors you can see from a distance, so you don’t get run down by speedboats. Black is rare. It suggests to me they may have done a custom paint job, picked black so they can disappear in the dusk or at night.”

  “ELF is going to attack the nuke plant at night? That’s what you’re suggesting? Converge in kayaks.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud, brainstorming. What’s wrong? This is your operation. You don’t seem very engaged.”

  “It was my operation. Now I’m not sure.”

  “You think I’m running off with it.”

  “You had a plane do a flyover and didn’t tell me. You talked to some croc expert, you interviewed Killibrew about the Levine case, and the other detective assigned to Bendell’s murder. Is there anything else you haven’t told me about my case?”

  “These photos,” Frank said. “It looks to me like they might be doing some kind of maneuver. Training exercises.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Sheffield looked at the tennis players, whooping at every shot. “There’s an agent from NCIS coming in tonight. We’ll be meeting at the downtown Four Seasons, eight o’clock. My SWAT guys will be there, and this agent is bringing his guys. He wants to hit Prince Key tomorrow night.”

  “Jesus, Frank. You’re just dropping this on me. This fait accompli. No discussion, nothing. What the hell is going on?”

  �
�The ante has just gone up.”

  “Quit playing with me, Frank. What’s this about?”

  “You ever hear of a chemical compound called HpNC?”

  She stared at him, her lips pressed into a flat line as if she were holding back a spew of curses.

  “It’s an experimental high explosive,” Frank said. “Makes dynamite and TNT, C-4, Semtex, look like firecrackers.”

  Nicole pushed the hair from her face and stared at Frank.

  “This NCIS guy is going to fill us in tonight. Now you’re up-to-date.”

  She said thanks, but it didn’t sound as if her heart was in it.

  * * *

  Six calls, no pickups. Claude was sitting at the bar at his favorite strip club, Stir Crazy, staring up at the skinny girl with angel wings tattooed on her shoulder blades, watching her hump a silver pole.

  He dialed Leslie’s number again, and again got nothing. Straight to voice mail. He clicked off. He’d already left three messages. He tried another text, sending the phone number Nicole had given him, the traitor working with the FBI. Then typing Call this #. This guy’s a spy. Off him.

  While he was typing, another hoochie mama came up to Claude and pressed her bare boobs against his arm.

  “Nice look,” she said. Reaching out, toying with the tips of his bolo tie.

  “My fashion statement.”

  “Yeah? What’s it say about you?”

  “I’m not your average cowboy.”

  “You look lonely, hun. You want a private dance?”

  Claude leaned back and checked her out. Tight body, gym rat. Not more than twenty-five. Pretty brown eyes, kinky black hair gelled smooth.

  Claude pressed SEND and heard the text whoosh away.

  “Three dances,” Claude said. “Twenty bucks.”

  “Dream on, sweetie.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That’ll get you one.”

  “It’s a long time till payday, sweet cheeks. I’m living on PB and J as it is.”

  “Time’s are tough all over,” the stripper said.

  “How ’bout two for thirty?”

  The girl frowned and her eyes strayed down the bar to the next chump.

  “Thirty for two, and I’ll give you a tip up front,” Claude said.

  “Yeah? What kind of tip?”

  “Floss every day, and you won’t be spitting out all those stupid gold teeth when you turn thirty.”

  Claude slid off the stool, walked toward the exit, the stripper shouting at him that he smelled like a bucket of shit.

  He stood in the parking lot next to Dixie Highway, thinking about Sheffield and Nicole. Thinking about them together last night and today. Then he bent his head to the side and sniffed the shoulder of his checked shirt.

  Hell, the stripper was right. He did smell pretty ripe. Maybe it was only his imagination but he believed he detected a lingering trace of Marcus Bendell, the human smoke bomb.

  Which gave him an idea.

  TWENTY-SIX

  AT EIGHT ON SATURDAY EVENING, Magnuson and his men were waiting for Sheffield in the sixth-floor conference room of the downtown Four Seasons. Paneled walls, halogen lighting turned high, four long tables squared up in the center, covered with white tablecloths, each place setting with a bottle of Evian water, a leatherbound notebook, and a laptop computer.

  Special Agent Magnuson was about Sheffield’s height but ran twenty pounds lighter and maybe ten years younger. As gaunt and sturdy as a Tour de France bike racer. He had white-blond hair and his pale blue eyes were probing and stern. Lips so thin, his mouth resembled a knife slit.

  He shook Sheffield’s hand, gripping with excessive force, then introduced his three-man team. Rogers, Harris, Pipes.

  He and his men were freshly barbered and decked out in versions of the same outfit. Spit-shined shoes, khaki trousers, and dark polos that hugged their brawny physiques. Behind him Sheffield’s SWAT team filed in, a ragtag bunch. They checked out the competition, whispering remarks to one another. His guys looked as if they’d been called away from a variety of Saturday activities. Backyard barbecues, movie dates, yard chores, and little Billy Dean Reynolds dressed as if he’d spent the day busting a string of wild broncos. Dusty jeans, beat-up cowboy boots, a red long-sleeve shirt with white pearl buttons.

  After everyone had shaken hands and taken their seats, Nicole appeared in the doorway, standing for a moment in a black tailored suit, her hair piled up and pinned with two strands broken free and framing her face. She struck a pose that was both businesslike and suggestive, as if this very professional woman had just rolled out of bed after hours of spirited lovemaking, which Frank knew was exactly the case.

  She walked over to Frank and he introduced her to Magnuson, who seemed utterly unaffected by her charms. Not so with the other eight men, who watched with various degrees of restraint as Nicole walked to one of the last open seats and took her place behind a laptop.

  The meeting lasted an hour. Magnuson ran the show, laid out the plan, explained the seriousness of taking down this target.

  Paul Chee was a master bombmaker who’d been trained by the best demolition experts the navy had. He’d demonstrated extraordinary skill at both disassembling and assembling munitions of every kind. He’d defused and dismantled IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan and grenades and unexploded artillery shells on battlefields and in sensitive public locations throughout Europe. He’d also planted highly sophisticated explosive devices in a variety of black-ops maneuvers that were classified but which Magnuson hinted were highly successful in removing leaders of various terrorist organizations.

  Sheffield’s guys listened, no questions, no whispering. The NCIS guys had obviously already been briefed on Chee’s history, but they kept their eyes fixed on Magnuson. A disciplined bunch.

  “During his time as a SEAL, he acquired the reputation for slipping in and out of hot zones with such stealth that some of his buddies began to consider his abilities supernatural. Now that Chee is on the run and has affiliated himself with a terrorist group, he’s still living up to that reputation.

  “Four times in the last two years we’ve had him in our sights, and when we moved in, he’s eluded capture. It is important to note that after each of those close calls, he has dropped off the radar for sustained periods.”

  Magnuson played a series of headshots of Paul Chee on the laptops. An exotically handsome man. The Navajo blood was clear, but his Anglo genes softened the angles in his face so he might easily pass for Greek or Italian. A strong nose, hard-edged cheekbones, dark, intelligent eyes, lips that seemed sensuous in some shots, severe in others. Chee might have impersonated an international banker, a manual laborer, or even a high-fashion model.

  “He’s physically strong, adept at martial arts, in excellent health. He’s a formidable enemy on any field of battle. But the fact that we believe he has in his possession several pounds of HpNC puts him at the very top of our list. HpNC was first synthesized in a lab in California a few years ago. It remains the most dangerous explosive in our arsenal, the one with the greatest density of any nonnuclear device.”

  Magnuson called their attention to a series of videos on their laptops.

  The clips featured steel-reinforced concrete walls, extrahardened and cast in place, built specifically to withstand direct assault. The kind of wall that surrounded military complexes, diplomatic stations, and the White House.

  These demonstrations had taken place at a military testing range in a desert setting where six walls of this type were subjected to different explosive assaults. TNT, dynamite, C-4, Semtex, HMX, and finally HpNC. In the first four cases, after the blasts, the walls were ruptured to some degree, but no breach was made in the concrete.

  In the next-to-the-last clip, the HMX opened a hole that a man might have slithered through, but the structural integrity of the wall remained firm.

  “Now this is why we’re concerned,” Magnuson said. “HpNC is a different animal.”

  And, yeah, t
he final detonation was something else entirely. No dust and debris sprayed into an explosive cloud. There was simply a bright flash, a whoosh. After the air cleared, only the foundation of the concrete wall remained among some smoldering rubble.

  “The explosive charge used in this final test consisted of a half pound of HpNC. Like most military explosives, it is detonator sensitive but bullet safe. Can’t be set off during a firefight by a stray round. But unlike all other devices of this type, after an explosion all components of the bomb and its detonator are obliterated. Which of course makes identifying the fingerprints of the explosive virtually impossible. A perfect terrorist weapon.

  “We believe Mr. Chee has in his possession about fourteen times the amount used in that video. And furthermore we believe he’s been scouting for some time for the appropriate target. The maximum effect.”

  Billy Dean Reynolds came to his feet. “We were told this group, Earth Liberation Front, they’re into arson. Burned down some SUV dealers and a ski development in Aspen. That’s the intel we have. How’s that match up with a guy like this?”

  Without looking up from the screen of her laptop, Nicole said, “A new generation is taking over. They’ve evolved from Molotov cocktails, turned themselves into some dangerous fuckers.”

  Everyone, including Magnuson this time, took a long, avid look at Nicole. Head down, still focused on her screen, she seemed to Frank to be basking in their attention, then she lifted her head and looked around the room, making eye contact with each one of them until finally settling on Frank. “Wouldn’t you agree, Agent Sheffield?”

  The way she spoke his name, the intimate sound of it on her tongue, made his SWAT guys turn to each other with lifted eyebrows and half-hidden smiles. All was revealed. Somehow she’d managed to expose everything that had happened between them with that simple question.

  Frank sat back in his chair and looked down at the table. Feeling a flush growing in his face. Had she meant to do that? Then thinking, hell, yes, Nicole was flaunting it, putting herself center stage. You better take me seriously, guys, I’m screwing the boss. Frank raised his eyes, glanced around the room, no one returning his gaze. As if maybe it hadn’t been as obvious as he thought. Either that or they were trying not to make it harder on him.