Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  Harper’s stomach coiled. “How?”

  “Harper they sliced my wrist and it’s bleeding everywhere.”

  Piper’s voice dissolved into panic. Travis came back on the phone.

  “So you see? The choice is simple, but it’s yours.”

  “Motherfucker,” she said.

  “You truly are a white trash she-bitch, Susannah.”

  “You slit her wrist?”

  “Not me personally.”

  Harper seemed to feel the road slide beneath her feet, as though it was a long ribbon and somebody had yanked on the other end.

  Travis said, “A single slice with a box cutter, across one wrist. Her hands are unfettered. Her feet are shackled and bolted to the floor, but her hands are free. She can raise the wrist overhead”—his voice veered away—“that’s it, Piper, hold it up, like you’re the Statue of Liberty. Clamp the other hand around the wound. Keep pressure on it.”

  Harper pressed a fist to her mouth.

  Travis said, “Huh. I may have underestimated the severity of the cut.” He paused, and his voice cooled another few degrees. “I’m not a doctor, but there’s a significant amount of blood. Go on, give her—yeah, that rag.” He was apparently talking to whoever had cut Piper. “Let her tie it around her wrist.” Back to Harper. “Thing about wounds like these, you can estimate how long it takes to bleed out, but it’s not an exact science.”

  Harper heard herself moan.

  “But I’ve seen this before,” Travis said. “It can take twenty minutes to empty the veins before the heart stops. And that’s a big heart, with both wrists cut.”

  Harper bent over and put a hand on her knee to keep from vomiting.

  “Give her an hour, tops,” he said.

  Travis’s father had committed suicide by slitting his wrists. Rowdy drank a liter of bourbon, downed a handful of Valium, and turned on the faucets. Travis found him floating, eyes wide, in a bathtub three feet deep with blood.

  “She won’t be able to maintain her strength or hold her hand on the wound much longer than that. Once she drops her wrist, gravity welcomes everything in her veins right back to Mother Earth.”

  Harper said nothing. Travis had idolized his father. Roland Maddox was terrifying and charismatic, and Travis had tried desperately to please him. When Travis failed, he suffered. Rowdy treated his family the same way he treated business deals: as win-lose, profit-loss. And Travis finally saw his dad go down hard, losing for good. For that, he blamed her.

  “Look on the ground behind the front wheel of that wrecked truck,” Travis said.

  Head ringing, Harper walked over. She knelt, one hand against the wheel, feeling sick. On the ground, she saw a phone.

  “That’s your new cell. It will ring with calls from me and nobody else. It will call me and nobody else.”

  She pressed the power key and stood up.

  “Now get Oscar’s phone from him,” Travis said. “Tell him it’s compromised. That the people he’s afraid of have the ability to track it. I want to see him throw it out the window.”

  She walked numbly to the MINI. She knocked on the window and, when Aiden lowered it, leaned down. “Gotta dump your phone, Oscar. Quick. It’s compromised.”

  She hoped Aiden would play along.

  It only took him a microsecond. Muffling his voice behind one hand to disguise it, he said, “But if I . . .”

  “No argument. Give it to me.”

  He took out his phone and handed it over. She held the phone up in the headlights so Travis could see it.

  “Throw it,” Travis said.

  She lobbed it into the rocky hillside. “He believed it’s compromised because he’s the one who set up the program to restrict call access on the phone you put behind the truck, isn’t he?”

  “You aren’t such a dumb cluck after all.” His voice had energy, a current of excitement that he couldn’t hide. “Is the new phone powered up?”

  She checked. “Yes.”

  “Now throw your burn phone away. Good and hard. Not like a girl.”

  She didn’t bother ending the call. She wound up and pitched it overhand high and hard at the mountainside. Even as she heard the burn phone hit the hillside, sending pebbles tumbling downslope, Travis’s new phone rang in her hand. She answered.

  “Get in that car and drive, Flynn.”

  “Where?” Harper said.

  He told her. She tried walking, but only because if she’d stood still, she would have gone down on her knees.

  42

  Sorenstam gripped the steering wheel with one hand. In her other, the phone seemed to emit an electrical shock. Tom White was no longer on the line, but his words buzzed through her. The car felt close. The dashboard lights seemed to pulse. Sorenstam kept rolling, her mind in overdrive.

  Oscar said, “You okay? You look . . . like somebody just hit you with a cattle prod.”

  Ticktock.

  She said, “What do you know about Spartan Security?”

  “It isn’t just an intruder alarm company. They don’t call to ask if you’re okay when your cat sets off the alarm. I mean, they do, but that’s not their bread and butter. I’m talking, these guys are deep into the spooky stuff. Iris identification, cloud surveillance, metadata.”

  Frowning, almost absentmindedly, Sorenstam said, “Spooky?”

  “I mean they’re run by ex-spooks and mercenaries. They took Blackwater as their template. They have all kinds of toys and techniques, human and algorithmic. They’re not Allstate Insurance. And they’re not the Boy Scouts.”

  She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. “They hire from a significantly broader pool of employees than that, don’t they?”

  “Plenty of guys have in-theater combat experience, military contractor training, security clearances, sure. The security guards and bouncers they send out . . . who knows what they’ve got. Mixed martial arts veterans? Ex-bikers?”

  “Criminal convictions?”

  He turned to her. His expression seemed to be searching to see if she was serious. “I haven’t seen their hiring reports, but . . . why not? You think these guys care about an arrest jacket? No way. Bet you fifty bucks they’d hire me. Bet you if I cracked their system, then turned up promising to show them the weaknesses in their programming, they’d give me an office and all the vending machine candy bars I could eat.”

  She accelerated, punching it toward the long downhill to the desert.

  “Tell me why you think the company didn’t lose all the data on the Xenon attack,” she said.

  “The very fact that Xenon had Spartan running its security contract meant it was forking out for the latest whiz-bang shit. Electronic key cards, electronic locks, it monitored everything second by second. Video, too.”

  “Camera on the alley was spray-painted before the attack began. So nobody could tell exactly which entrance they used, or how—with a key, or because somebody inside opened a door. Nobody was monitoring the video on-site.”

  “Was the video sent digitally to Spartan in real time?” Oscar said.

  She hesitated. “I never thought so.”

  “I bet it was,” he said. “If they had downloadable data from the door locks, I bet it was sent in real time, too. To the cloud.”

  Spartan had told the sheriff’s department that the only data they were capable of receiving live from Xenon was an alarm—a breach of physical security because of a break-in. All the rest, the swipe-card information, was limited to the cash registers and the locks themselves. Once the fire cut power in the building, to retrieve data from a particular lock, a technician would have had to physically attach a card reader cabled to a handheld terminal, and download the information from each individual lock. That, Spartan had told the LASD, was the only way to transfer the information from the locking system. And when the building burned, all the hi
story contained in the locks burned with it.

  “They told us everything was destroyed.”

  Oscar said, “I bet that someplace in Spartan’s records, there’s a trail. Despite what they told you.”

  “You think they uploaded all data from the club automatically, to their cloud backup.”

  “Bingo.”

  Hell.

  She felt Oscar’s eyes on her in the darkened car.

  “Where are we going so fast?” he said.

  “To catch up with your pal Harper.” And with Aiden.

  The car gained speed. She grabbed the radio and called her lieutenant.

  “Are you on your way back here?” he said.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s been an hour, Detective.”

  “There’s been a development. I need a background check on—”

  “Detective. Stand down,” he said.

  She wanted to pound the wheel in frustration. “Detective Garrison is in danger.”

  “Tell me about it when you get back here. You’re done. Turn around, Sorenstam.”

  She was going north at ninety mph, far from home, with no backup, and she knew that tone in the lieutenant’s voice. Oscar was watching her, confused.

  “Detective? I said, turn around and return to the station. You’re done.”

  The headlights swallowed the road. Her foot rested heavy on the gas.

  “I hear you,” she said. “Out.” She dropped the radio.

  Her gut said: Go. Screw it. She floored it north on the highway, trying to catch up to Aiden and Harper.

  Ticktock.

  She’d run across that expression twice tonight. Once from Tom White, sounding harassed. And once on Harper Flynn’s phone, in the parking lot at the diner, when the kidnapper told her to get moving if she wanted to see Piper Westerman alive again.

  Tom White was Travis Maddox.

  Tom White stared out across the desert night. On the handheld video monitor, Harper Flynn ran to her car and drove away.

  In his ears, the sound of Detective Sorenstam’s voice lingered.

  She had no reason to run his name for a criminal background check. If she did, nothing would come up. It would end there, with ninety-nine percent certainty.

  If it didn’t, he was covered. His bosses would back him up.

  T. M. White. Anybody would have changed their name in his circumstances. Going from the dark side to being a White Hat. Spartan had understood. They all called him Tom. He had eight clean years under his belt now. But he’d always have a felony stretch on his record, forty-eight months of real prison time. Four years she owed him.

  Travis Maddox White calmed his breathing and thought about how he was going to handle Harper Flynn and the people she’d collected around herself like iron filings around a magnet.

  Spartan Security Systems knew about his history. They didn’t know how much he had enjoyed it. Living in China Lake with his dad, Lila Flynn, and little sneaky Susannah, figuring out how to crack systems, learning phone skills, blue boxing, old school. In East Buttfuck, if you didn’t play football or ride dirt bikes, you had endless time on your hands. As long as you didn’t fill it with meth or masturbation, you could learn all kinds of skills.

  Such as phishing, and coding malware, and learning how to disarm a simple burglar alarm system so that you could get inside some dumb dick’s house and liberate the stuff he should have protected more securely.

  Four years in Chino had left him with some catching up to do as far as tech. But it had honed the rest of his skills. He left prison with a cut physique, some scars, and the knowledge that he could survive anything. With enough incentive, he could become immortal. He could even use his knowledge as a hacker and a thief to become a security expert—a bad boy, but Spartan’s bad boy.

  And at Spartan, he bided his time, playing the dutiful office drone. Running his side business sub rosa. And tracking down Susannah Flynn, so that he could collect on the bill that was long overdue.

  Susannah Flynn. Little Fly, he had called her, back when she moved into the half-built hacienda on the hill south of China Lake. When he first met her, she had seemed like a meerkat, skinny kid, all legs and elbows and wide eyes that sought danger at every turn. She was no fool. She knew her mom had brought her to a house where she was bottom of the heap, runt of a litter that showed mercy to no one.

  It took him a while to figure out that she was adaptable, and quick, and had learned too well the skills his dad had taught them all. Sleight of hand. Smash-and-dash. Pin the blame on somebody else. He should have seen it, but she’d always seemed so frightened of him, even—especially—when he eyed her and saw her lips slightly parted, her smooth face glowing in the summer sun, her chest rising and falling, skin pale where her blouse buttoned on her chest. His dad told him: “Don’t touch.” Don’t mix business and pleasure. Don’t shit where you eat. His dad was afraid that Travis would get her pregnant, through love or insistence. His dad would have torn his nuts off. So Travis had kept his hands off her. But he saw the way she acted around him. She was a tease. How else could she have done what she did?

  After he was released, it took him a long time to find her again. The California juvenile justice system was serious about protecting the privacy of former inmates. The state might have vindictively voted in three-strikes laws, but when it came to apple-cheeked little white girls, they were still willing to cut Barbie some slack. Finding her had taken lawyers, and money, and patience, and patience, and patience. It had taken his job at Spartan, where he finally had access to mind-blowing data mining software. She had legally changed her name. But she couldn’t change her social security number. She couldn’t change her date of birth, or who she was related to. Court records, military records, college enrollment records . . . eventually, he located her.

  Going to college part-time, grinding out her degree a course at a time, sometimes at night, and working the usual round of jobs. Barista. Waitress. Finally, bartender at Xenon.

  He didn’t actually mind that she’d gone legit. It would have infuriated him to learn that she had escaped unscathed after their arrest, only to pick up where she’d left off. No, what burned him, among the many things that burned him, was that she had fled, and saved herself at his expense, only to adopt a bog-standard, mundane life. Something so socially expected. Something so unworthy and dull and small. Of course, it could be an act. She had been expert at playing along, only to send his life up in flames. She could be doing the same now.

  Flames. He gritted his teeth.

  The original plan had seemed ideal: two birds with one heavy stone. Xenon had drawn him like a neon flower. Both physically and emotionally, it was an excellent place to carry out the plan. And that plan had seemed so elegant. Attack a criminal who hadn’t paid his debts—Arliss Bale. Do it at the club where Harper worked.

  She had sent him to prison. He would even the scales. A heavy fall this time, not juvy. Clone the swipe card, implicate her in the attack.

  Regrettably, Zero’s no-rules-of-engagement style involved one of the guy’s favorite props: a Molotov cocktail. So easy, so reliable. Zero liked fire. Loved the heat and the instant panic it caused, the chaos, ever building. Loved the power and the knowledge that he was the one who had unleashed such a primal force.

  So, that night at Xenon, when the tide started turning and Arliss Bale’s bodyguards began firing back, Zero pulled out his showstopper. Cleanse the scene. Distract everybody. Unluckily, he killed some bystanders.

  Zero had burned Xenon to the ground. And he had escaped, amazingly, without leaving a physical trace of himself on the operation. The man was smoke itself. He needed to be. And, once the crime scene turned into a murder investigation, so did Travis Maddox White. For a year, Travis had thought it had worked and that any scent of their involvement had evaporated.

  But no. The swipe card. Th
e clone was supposed to be the piece of evidence that linked Harper Flynn to the attack. It should have been perfect: An employee illegally provides access to armed intruders who start shooting at a gangster across a crowded dance floor. Harper would have been roasted on a spit.

  Instead, flames. Bodies. After the fire, his off-the-books business had dried up, and Harper had gone on her way. Now, Detective Sorenstam not only had Harper’s original swipe card, she had her teeth into the case again. And he was now in the line of fire. It was a fiasco.

  But he had the trump card that would change everything. He had Piper.

  On the monitor, he watched Harper’s car spin its tires and race away. He looked out across the shimmering desert night. She was coming. At last.

  43

  North, into a canyon that cut between the walls of the desert mountains, Sorenstam drove, trying to catch up with Harper and Aiden. The highway had emptied out. She’d called in a request to the station to check on Tom White of Spartan Security Systems—wants, warrants, and aliases, especially the name Travis Maddox. But she was on her own. Even with Oscar Sierra in the passenger seat.

  She nodded at him. “Try Aiden again.”

  Oscar palmed the phone and redialed, but shook his head. “No luck. I’ll text them both.”

  “Either Harper’s new phone’s been dumped already, or they can’t get service.”

  In the twenty-first century, forty miles from Hollywood, driving through a land where the electric grid pumped out seven thousand megawatts, they had crossed the pass into nothing but sand and space, and might as well have been crossing the frontier with a mule team. The darkness briefly seemed to swell, to encompass not just the car but her, inside and out.

  Aiden. He’d been right to trust Harper. Now he was out there, strong but broken, searching with nothing but instinct and guts.

  Oscar keyed in a text message. “Doesn’t matter if Harper knows Travis is working for Spartan, pretending he’s gone corporate. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. The rest is just evidence for prosecution. You’re excited about it ’cause it helps you put your case together, but haters gonna hate. Travis is gonna bite, and Harper knows it.”