DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3)

by T. J. Brearton

  CHAPTER TEN / WEDNESDAY, 4:09 PM

  The first blow to his stomach knocked the wind out of him. The second and third, he barely felt. He got numb. Unable to breathe, unable to stand, but, numb.

  Brendan dropped to his knees in front of Baker and Ephraim, the two COs. Grimm loomed behind them, darkening the doorway to the isolation cell.

  “Far as I’m concerned you can rot in here until your trial,” Grimm said.

  Brendan’s head hung forward, his chin resting on his chest. He closed his eyes. He pictured Sloane. Then there was a bright burst of light as one of the guards kicked him in the head.

  When he came to, sometime later, he was lying on his side. He could see beneath his cot. The book was there. He reached out and pulled it to him. He rolled over onto his back, wincing at the pain in his abdomen, cramping the muscles, in his skull, cutting through his thoughts like saw blades. He held the book up over his face and looked at it.

  It was The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis.

  He hadn’t been completely honest with Jennifer Aiken. He’d had some contact with the outside world since he’d been in here. Minimal, but some. A man he never expected to hear from again, Rudy Colinas. Colinas had been his partner on the Rebecca Heilshorn murder case. He’d blown the whistle on Brendan when Brendan had gone off on his own, and it had saved Brendan’s life. He’d helped him, too, while Brendan had investigated Argon’s death as a private citizen, and then he’d felt the need to stop, for fear of his career, his life, his family. But then after Brendan had been inside Rikers for two months, Colinas had sent this book and a short note.

  Brendan took the note out now and read it for the hundredth time.

  “Thought you’d like this,” Colinas wrote. “Remind you of the good old days. Ha ha.”

  Another C.S. Lewis book, The Screwtape Letters, had been found at the scene of the Rebecca Heilshorn murder. It had helped Brendan to crack the case. Colinas was referring to that with his typical black humor.

  “Check out page 98. That’s my favorite. Makes me think of you. Makes me think of the future. Keep your head down in there. Reject any marriage proposals. Hey, at least you’re ugly. That should help. Stay strong, my brother. — R.”

  Brendan kept the note tucked into the passage Colinas had mentioned. Now he read the text highlighted in the book, as he did nearly every day.

  “Son,” he said, “Ye cannot, in your present state, understand eternity . . . That is what mortals misunderstand.

  “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

  The page shook; his hands were trembling. He dropped the book to the floor and covered his face. He let the anger pass through him, a sensation of flames licking the channels of his body, the belching heat of a furnace somewhere deep within.

  Every day, he was grateful to Colinas for that book. He didn’t think Colinas could know the extent to which it would not only release a flood of feelings in Brendan, but grant him insights, too.

  He related the passage to himself, to his own life. There was no doubt about that. He was haunted by what he had done wrong and he had to make things right. But he wasn’t alone. Philip Largo was another man, like him, who’d strayed from the path and suffered the enduring consequences. The two men were tied together by fate.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN / THURSDAY, 9:41 AM

  Philip Largo looked terrible. His skin seemed pulled too tightly over his face, which was otherwise handsome — he had sharp cheekbones and full lips. He had the look of a governor, despite the smudges of fatigue and the bent corners of his mouth. Since John F. Kennedy, what a politician really needed most was a camera-friendly face. Beneath the strain, Philip Largo had it. Jennifer wondered why someone like him, with a beautiful wife and children, and a bright future ahead of him, would have ever wanted to sleep with a prostitute.

  They sat at his small lakeside home in Western New York. The place was no great shakes — a one-bedroom cabin that looked like the kind the guy might have fixed up in more robust times. The high grass had gone to seed, swishing against the shiplap siding of the house in the breeze from the lake. It was as if Largo had just decided to let it all go.

  He regarded Jennifer with wary suspicion.

  “Thank you so much,” she began, “for agreeing to meet with me.”

  He fidgeted for a moment, in a boyish way, before he looked up at her. “You’re persuasive.”

  She smiled at him. She felt a bit better after a night’s rest, after leaving Rikers Island behind. She’d even gone for a walk that morning, feeling some relief in her joints and muscles, grateful for a temporary reprieve from the headaches and unnerving visual anomalies. She knew it wouldn’t last forever, though.

  He watched her, seeming to examine her, in a similar way to Brendan. They sat in a pair of wooden chairs, and faced each other in his overgrown yard. Jennifer’s security detail was nearby, one standing next to the vehicles in the driveway, another walking the perimeter, a third down by the cattails along the lakeshore, looking decidedly out of place there, a large man in a black suit framed by the silvery water.

  “See these guys?” She twirled her finger, loosely pointing at the security detail. “I went for a walk this morning . . . I used to be a runner. They’ve got me at a Marriott Courtyard just south of Rochester. Not a bad place. Nothing around, though. I guess it’s where Xerox used to have offices, warehouses, and they’re all gone. Anyway, I go for my walk and these guys are driving along behind me. They follow me everywhere.”

  He turned his wounded eyes on her; now she saw the frustration deep within him. The worst kind — the knotted, twisted, obdurate kind that resisted its own resolve. The kind of frustration a person could lose themselves to, because they knew not trying to fix it somehow gave them license to do other things. To let the anger roil to the surface. It was a dangerous state to be in. She could see why Philip Largo had tucked himself away here, away from everything. He was afraid of what he might do.

  Or, there was something else. Something more.

  She tried to coax him out of his shell. “The reason I have them pasted to me like three overgrown kids is because of what happened to me. I was abducted in broad daylight, back when I was a strong runner.” She watched him countenance this and continued. “I was taken to a building in Manhattan and dosed with thallium nitrate. I was interrogated, and the idea was if I gave the other side what they wanted, they’d administer an antidote. But I never really believed that, because they never really meant it. They wanted to find out what I knew and then kill me. So, you can trust me, Mr. Largo, because I’m not dead. Because after seven months of hiding out in New York and Washington, I’m back out in the world.” She paused, thinking better of tacking on the phrase, and you can be, too.

  His expression softened and he gazed out over the lake. The way he sat in his chair, with his hands out on his knees, he looked like a person sorely out of place. He belonged in office. It killed him to be here like this, to be purposeless.

  “Nobody has been on my side for a long time,” he said, not in a self-pitying way, but matter-of-factly. He nodded to himself, then lifted his hands from his knees and looked down and studied them as if there were answers there to the riddles of human nature.

  She leaned in slightly. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? In your own words. Not the words you were coached by your people to say to the media.”

  He looked up from his hands. “They did a good job of delivering me from all that, pretty quick, don’t you think? For a scandal, it had less publicity than others. You would’ve thought they’d make hay.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t discount that there were people in the media who actually liked you and what you stood for, and couldn’t bring themselves to get in on the lynching.”

  He watched her for a moment and then looked away again.

  She steeled herself and took a breath. It was o
ne thing to talk over the phone, it was another to do this sort of thing in person. “Mr. Largo . . . Can you answer something for me?”

  “I can try,” he said, looking out over the lake again.

  “Can you verify that the name of the escort was Danice?”

  He slowly turned back to her. “I can.”

  “Do you know what Danice’s real identity was?”

  She saw him draw a deep breath, marshaling the will to tell his story. “It was a long time ago.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s best if I just tell you what happened.”

  “I would like that.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “Celia, that’s my wife, she knew it was going to be hard for us, the life of a politician.” His eyelids drifted up. “I didn’t think it would be that hard, though. I’m from out here, you know? I was born in Almond. She’s from the Midwest. I thought, okay, I’ll spend the time in Albany and I’ll be home every other weekend and we’ll make it work.” He tilted his forehead down, his sad eyes peering up from beneath his furrowed brow.

  She nodded in encouragement.

  “Well, it’s never what you think. You get pulled away for weeks at a time, you miss one weekend and you realize it’s a month since you’ve been home. You’re missing things with your kids, your wife is becoming a stranger. And then, ramping up to campaign, forget it. You’re raising money, looking at all the initiatives, budget talks until six in the morning . . . I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying — I jumped at the chance to run, if only because if I won, we could all live together in Albany, and it would solve so many problems. Not to mention, you know, I would be governor.”

  He smiled and she saw some of that old Largo, the charmer in front of the cameras, the impassioned, rising star transcending the broken legislature. She saw his sincerity, too. She didn’t question whether the office itself was more a motivating factor than his desire to bring his family back together. He would have done a great job, if not for that reason alone.

  “And then one night, it’s late, I’ve been out with some of my staff, it’s been two months since I’ve been home to visit . . . Ceal and I are in this long, quiet fight, on and off over the phone. And there she is. This girl who’s been sort of popping up all night; I thought she was a friend of one of my staffers, maybe an intern I hadn’t met, but by now my staff have all gone home and I’m sitting there at the bar and I know I’ve got to turn in but it’s just . . . in that moment, I didn’t want to. You know? One of those nights where going to bed just means waking up the next day and having to start all over again and I don’t know. . . I needed a break.”

  Largo leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “God,” he said, “she was barely in her twenties.” He was silent for a moment and Jennifer didn’t press him any further. She looked around at her security detail. Much as she’d bemoaned their presence, she already felt a fondness for them. The one by the pond had gotten up and was further away along the edge, turning to where a path led into a section of woods.

  “Philip,” she said softly. He looked up. She saw tears in his eyes. “Do you know who she was?”

  He gave her a long look. “I read about it, saw a few things on TV. And I heard, from a few close friends.”

  She waited for him to say the name. Instead he looked down again, and she realized he was trying to hide his fear from her.

  “I understand the need for discretion. You knew you had to step out of the race, and disappear from politics altogether, or that the information you were with . . . someone . . . it was going to be made public.”

  His head snapped up to look at her, and she saw that fear burning together with a savage protective look.

  “More than that. I had a family. Still do. Even if I’m not with them.”

  If someone had put this hook into him, they still had him on a taut line.

  “Okay,” she said, thinking. “Let me ask you this — why? Why do you think someone would want to bring you down? An issue you dug your heels in on? I’ve gone over your bio, I know what you did as an assemblyman. There’s no one obvious tack you seem to follow, you really acted bipartisan. Something I missed?”

  He gathered himself together and sat up straighter. His eyes narrowed into a hawkish stare.

  “You work for the Justice Department?”

  “Correct.”

  “As a special prosecutor.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ll say I’m nuts.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You’ll say its conspiracy-theory bullshit.”

  “Try me.”

  He lifted an arm and pointed behind her. “Are your men . . . what are they doing?”

  She looked behind her. Two of her security detail were trotting away from the house, down the dirt driveway, while the other guy remained by the vehicles, speaking into the transmitter attached to his sleeve cuff.

  CHAPTER TWELVE / THURSDAY, 10:23 AM

  Jennifer and Largo stood up and watched as the security guy by the vehicles turned and came across the yard towards them. Jennifer’s heart pounded. He called over to them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s okay. Couple kids back there tromping through the woods, I guess they’re just kids being kids, trying to get a closer look at us.”

  Jennifer saw the two other security guards coming back down the driveway towards Largo’s property. They looked grim, perturbed by the intruders, harmless kids or not.

  Still, she felt her pulse easing. Largo said, “I should have warned you about that. The nearest neighbor is about a quarter mile away, and there’re always kids out there. This is really their turf.”

  She offered Largo a smile and gestured for him to sit down. She could see how frayed his nerves were. Hers didn’t feel much better. Once they were facing each other again, she tried to recover the openness they’d started to get going.

  “You were saying?”

  He cleared his throat and seemed to find his bearings. “Part of my job as assemblyman involved looking into land development in rural areas. There’s a lot of farm country in New York, more than a lot of people know. And the UN’s report on future global food shortages has prompted policy ideas from the Pentagon.”

  She nodded. “Eminent domain. I’m friends with the director of the Bureau of Land Management.”

  “Then you know that it’s controversial. People are worried they’re going to be shipped off to high-density housing in cities while the government takes over all the farmland.” He looked at her with pleading eyes. “I’m not an alarmist, Agent Aiken, or a conspiracy theorist. I’m not. But I came across something while I was doing my research on rural land use.”

  “Please.”

  He gripped his knees. “Okay. What you won’t find, even as an agent for the Department of Justice, what you won’t find, declassified, are the no-bid contracts Titan Med Tech and Titan Construction got with the US Military. And I’m talking military, armed forces, but I’m also talking about local, county, state, and federal law enforcement. There’s been the push since 9/11 to have all law enforcement bodies speaking the same language, cooperating. And armed to the teeth. We’re talking military tanks in the sheriff’s department. Drones in the Texas sky.”

  “That’s pretty drastic.” But she found herself thinking about Seamus Argon. About people who believed only militias could resist the US government and military taking total authoritarian control of the country.

  “You wanted me to speak plainly.”

  “I did, I do.”

  “Titan subsidiaries get exclusive contracts, in one case for all medical supplies for this conglomeration of state, local, federal law enforcement, and a huge chunk of armed forces. Billions of dollars. It was my job to look into Titan because of land development in Albany. Specifically, the UAlbany campus.”

  She knew the building. Titan Construction had erected a new campus building for UAlbany. The New Business School was where Brendan Healy had waged his showdown with R
eginald Forrester and Jerry Brown. Brendan had been searching for Rebecca Heilshorn’s killer.

  “So you were . . . generally suspicious of Titan, due to what you found with the Titan Med Tech contracts for US military and police. And so, what, you moved to block the construction at UAlbany?”

  “Generally suspicious? Yeah. You could say that. I started looking at the specs for the building. That was my job. And I found something.”

  “What?”

  “Part of the design for the building was for a massive data center. Like the kind only found in a few places around the world. London, Paris, Los Angeles. There are two in Manhattan. They call one of them the Meet-Me-Room.”

  “Why would Titan . . . why would UAlbany want to build a data center there?”

  “My question exactly. And where would they get the money? That’s hundreds of millions. Maybe more. So I spoke to the president of the college. Or, I tried to. He was evasive, to put it nicely. Nobody seemed to want to talk about it. I wanted to know who was in charge of making this kind of a decision for the state — for the country, really. And, again, who was funding it.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Closed doors, mostly. I uncovered a labyrinth of money that was moved around through dummies and shell corporations. I saw a word, once or twice: Altnet. And then I received a memo from US Cyber Command, a division of the CSS. Telling me to cease my inquiry. That there were matters of national security at stake.”

  She felt something cold twist inside of her, and shivered in her light coat despite the fact that the sun was shining on a warm June day.

  She was at a loss for the moment. Largo had seen something the government didn’t want him to. It was possible the government could have been already on to Nonsystem back then, and didn’t want Largo inadvertently screwing up a covert operation. It happened more often than people liked to admit, unanticipated crossover in the government that made a mess of things.