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

by T. J. Brearton

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “The reality is, we’ve spent years eliminating any and everyone in the Middle East who won’t play ball with us so we can get what we want there. Take a close look, Agent Aiken, at the physical conflicts between India and Pakistan, the Israelis and Palestinians or the collapse of Yugoslavia, and you see a mirror of the cyberspace warfare reflecting back from the real-world violence. Up until now, the main cyberwar targets have been military. But attacks on multinational corporations are rising. You take one of these multinationals down, if only for a short time, and you’ve done more damage to your enemy’s economy than a dozen bombings. What’s more, you take out their utilities, you wreck their water, their power, their heat, and you bring a nation to its knees. But this is not done internally. This is done by hiring out rogue groups — just like weapons manufacturers — or in this case, hackers-for-hire.”

  Jennifer was silent. The dancing flames along the perimeter of her vision had retreated, but she could still feel their heat in her head. “They’re going to say that you were hired by an enemy of the US to attack us.”

  “That’s why you’re here, Agent Aiken. Your superiors have placed you in the center of this. To go after a terrorist group. But you haven’t done what they expected, have you?”

  Jennifer felt a twinge of embarrassment, as if Gentian had seen right into her recent past. Throwing away her phone, running from her superiors, essentially disobeying orders to see what would come of all of this if she were, for a merciful few moments, unencumbered by procedure.

  She took another deep breath, gathering her wits. She looked around the room at the youthful faces, and she felt the stillness surrounding her. In the distance she thought she heard a ship’s bell sounding over the dark waters of the ocean.

  She pushed the papers at Gentian. “Whatever this is, whatever is coming, it’s going to cost lives. I want to minimize that. I want to warn people, I want to get people out of harm’s way.”

  She walked to the front door, and everyone’s eyes followed her. Gentian spoke. “When they were with you, when they had you in that building, they told you, didn’t they? They said it.”

  “Excuse me? Said what?”

  “What you saw in the data tonight, Ms. Aiken. Lebensluge. It’s basically been happening for seventy years, since Alexander Heilshorn was born, you might say, and it’s now coming together.”

  Suddenly the lights flickered, turning briefly on, then dousing again.

  “The grid is taking hits right now,” Gentian said. “They’re going to be shutting down sections because the backup system is only capable of supporting a fraction of the power needs of the northeast. So they’ll start isolating, keeping power going to where they choose. What house, what restaurant, or what military base. Like Camp Edwards. Backup power will stay on there.”

  Jennifer heard vehicles pull up out outside in the driveway, doors open and close.

  The young woman who’d given Jennifer the papers now stood by the window, looking out.

  “They’re here,” she said.

  Gentian looked at Jennifer, and for the first time she thought she saw fear in his eyes. “You know now,” he said. “Just remember. You know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX / FRIDAY, 7:34 AM

  The sun burst off the glass of the Midtown buildings. Brendan stood looking down on the city, the hotel room to his back. He picked up his bag and walked back to the door. Sloane sat watching on the edge of the bed, dressed. Her eyes were bright in the light blasting into the room, her expression tight, her angled, beautiful face hard, the way he remembered first seeing her in the Holy Ro’ church basement.

  He stood, gripping the door handle. He’d told her his appointment would last the better part of the morning, and he would get in touch after. He wasn’t keeping the hotel room, he’d said. Too expensive. He needed to figure something out. She wanted to help him, she’d told him, in the hours before daybreak. They’d meet up later and figure it out together.

  They both knew it wasn’t true.

  He closed the door as she turned to look out at the dazzling morning. When the door closed, he could feel it in his chest.

  He rode the elevator to a random floor, stepped off, and followed the hallway until he came to the service stairs. He took these down to the kitchen, where griddles snapped and hissed with bacon, and hustling cooks served up eggs, orange wedges, sprigs of parsley, on white plates. Brendan moved through the kitchen to a back door and shoved it open. Outside two dishwashers in stained white aprons smoked cigarettes. They offered surprised smiles as he nodded his way past them, down a short alleyway out on to West 52nd Street.

  On 52nd, he hailed a cab and told the driver to floor it for Penn Station, a few blocks away. He needed to keep off the streets. After five minutes of starts and stops, the city flowing all around him, he got out the cab and entered the massive station.

  Despite everything, he felt good. At least, physically. He sensed the tautness of his muscles, the readiness in his ligaments. Six months of lifting weights had left him in better shape than he had been in years. Maybe his entire life. He’d beaten Laruso, he’d beaten Rikers. As he walked through the manic station, he felt like he could scale the walls. Grab hold of the steel girders and climb and get above everything and everyone.

  He stopped for a coffee and an overpriced egg sandwich. He bought his ticket for the Adirondacker, and then had fifteen minutes to kill while he waited to board.

  He wanted to keep moving, to keep feeling good, to stay ahead of his thoughts, so he walked. But now that he had his ticket and was waiting to board, the questions started rolling in, the sense of betrayal closed around his heart.

  Sloane.

  Sloane had lied to him.

  But was it that fact which upset him so much? Or was it this idea that there was more to the relationship between her and Argon? As an investigator, his job was to grope his way towards the light. But now it was personal. He had a relationship, a close relationship, with someone involved in the whole Titan mess, and rather than be right there beside him, like he’d thought she would be, she was somewhere else. They couldn’t be together.

  “Going, somewhere, Healy?”

  He stopped abruptly. A man was standing against a tiled wall, in between two blocks of cubicle shops. Brendan knew him.

  Commuters and travelers were crisscrossing in between them. Brendan waited for a break in the traffic and stepped towards the man. He was dressed in black. Handsome, in a pinched-face kind of way, his hair wispy and thin. One of his shoulders stooped.

  “Just out walking,” Brendan said to him. He took a sip of coffee from his paper cup. In one hand he held the coffee, in the other hand his breakfast sandwich. His skin tingled around the base of his neck and his ears. He felt the scar that ran from his temple to his jaw pulse with his heartbeat. He’d been careful, watching his every move since leaving Rikers, but this felt unavoidable. Even though he’d left Sloane, they’d already gotten him in their crosshairs.

  “People-watching?” the man added with a smug grin.

  “That’s right.”

  “Me too. Love to watch people.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Been watching you for a while now.”

  “I know.”

  Brendan sipped the coffee, never taking his eyes away. He smacked his lips. He was making a show of the whole thing, and it felt good. Dammit, it felt good. “I saw you last night. On the Third Street subway platform. I noticed that hitch in your step. That from chasing me through Roosevelt?”

  The smug look went away. “Then you know I’m not going to let you leave the city.”

  Brendan was silent.

  “That wasn’t very nice the way you left Ms. Dewan like that. She’s upset.”

  This is where they want to put the clamps on me, Brendan thought. Now I’m supposed to break down, say, Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything you want.

  “She should
be upset,” he said.

  The man raised his eyebrows. “That’s not very nice.”

  “I’m not very nice.”

  “Oh, I think you’re a good guy, Healy. We all do.” Then the man’s eyes flicked in a couple of different directions and Brendan looked around at the others closing in. One woman, another man. He’d seen the woman the night before. The second man was a new face. They moved through the zigzagging commuters, like wolves coming through the high grass.

  Brendan took another showy sip of his coffee, which tasted bitter in his mouth. His skin had gone cold.

  The man said, “Do you know who we are, Healy?”

  Suddenly he conjured another one of the lines from the C.S. Lewis book Colinas had sent him. The words filled his mind, temporarily blotting out all else, like airplane writing in the sky.

  The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.

  Was that were Angie and Gloria were now? Were they in Heaven? Could they see him? Was his own past somehow a part of that Heaven, was everyone’s past their Heaven or their Hell? Could they see him from those recesses?

  Was Judgment Day simply a bright, incontrovertible, instantaneous burst of all days gone by, a life-flashing-before you moment that stretched on into eternity? Was he a good man?

  The gun came out, just the tip of it, held casually by the man standing against the tiled wall as if it were his own cup of coffee.

  With his other hand, he held up a badge. Brendan scrutinized it — metal alloy, pewter with brass luster, a crest bearing heraldic lion in its center. The badge went away. “You need to come with us, Mr. Healy. Rejoin your friend.”

  She’s not there. She already left. She got away . . .

  The woman reached Brendan and stood close beside him. He remembered her alias was Persephone. She’d tried to take Brendan and Sloane into custody in the parking garage of Roosevelt Hospital. “It’s your only choice really; along with Ms. Dewan, you’ve now been designated as a national security threat by the FBI and the Central Security Service. Every uniform in the country from commissioners to traffic cops are going to have your picture. Come with us, now, Brendan. Help your country. Let’s put this whole mess behind us.”

  “You’re kidding me,” he said. His words felt heavy — literally heavy, as if it took a great effort to speak. His lungs felt filled with wet sand. His body, throbbing like one giant muscle.

  “We wouldn’t joke about something like this,” the first agent said. Hermes.

  “Trust us,” added Persephone.

  “Trust you. You have a gun on me. Staryles offered me a deal. He wanted me to come work for you. When I didn’t, he left me in jail.”

  “You made your own decisions,” said Persephone. She was so close he could feel her breath on his ear. There was an announcement on the loudspeakers that the Adirondacker was now boarding.

  “What you’re feeling right now?” whispered Persephone. “That’s your better judgment, trying to assert itself. Your loyalty to your country. Your rational mind, rejecting all of the paranoid ideas. They’re becoming a habit, those ideas. And you know about habits, don’t you, detective?”

  He could smell her. Some kind of lilac shampoo, but not enough to mask another odor, like something exhumed from a chest or from inside the trunk of a car. Something stale, trapped.

  He didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes forward, kept the gun Hermes was holding low and mostly hidden in his vision. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

  Persephone slipped her hand around his wrist. “You need to be with us,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN / FRIDAY, 7:44 AM

  FBI agents in full tactical gear rammed into the place first. Other agents in dress suits streamed in behind them. The group of young people were yanked to their feet, read their rights. When Rascher came in through the front door he grabbed Jennifer, pulling her outside amid the commotion.

  If the driveway had been choked with vehicles before, it was like parking at a rock concert now, only the majority of vehicles were black SUVs and town cars. As Rascher led her toward the front lawn of Argon’s house and her eyes swept the scene, Jennifer counted at least three vehicles that belonged to the Justice Department, and five from the FBI.

  Agents crawled all over the small property. Now that the bust had gone down, and the members were in custody — unarmed, unresisting — some of the agents stood around chatting. The rest of them were bringing out the Nonsystem group in handcuffs, parading them down the front steps of Argon’s house. Most of the group slouched in submission, eyes downcast, but Gentian looked at her as he was hustled past, his eyes calm. The agent behind him shoved him to move faster.

  Bostrom was brought out last. He looked at Jennifer, without emotion.

  “God, what a mess,” Rascher said beside her. “You start in one place, who knows where you’re going to wind up.”

  “You asshole,” she said.

  She could feel him shrug against her, acting smug. “Yeah, well, you know, you went as far as you could go.”

  He stepped away, putting his hands on his hips. She watched Bostrom being placed in the back of one of the SUVs. Rascher’s words stirred the bile in her stomach. As if he knew. As if he’d struggled to crawl out of the dark place she’d found herself in seven months ago. As if he’d been held captive in a Manhattan tower and poisoned nearly to death. “This was my call, John. This was my operation.”

  She saw Bostrom pass her a look from across the hoods of the vehicles smothering the small dirt driveway, a look that penetrated the core of her, before the FBI agent pushed his head down and Bostrom disappeared behind black-tinted windows.

  He had driven her across half of New York State and into Massachusetts, evading his own department. Why bring her here? It had only resulted in Nonsystem’s capture.

  “You did well, Jen,” said Rascher beside her. She could smell extra Christian Dior cologne on him this morning. And something else. A trace of booze maybe, a bit of Amaretto in the coffee. Or maybe that was her imagination. Maybe she just wanted to find some fault in him, something she could use against him, because he’d always been so friggin’ meticulous. He covered his ass.

  “It was scary there for a little while,” he said. “We thought we’d lost you all over again. Bostrom going rogue like that; no one expected a kidnapping. I was worried, Jen.” He gave her a compassionate look that was so contrived it seemed inhuman. “We all were.”

  She opened her mouth slightly, then pursed her lips. What was she going to do? Argue with him? Storm away? Have him put the cuffs on her, too? There would be weeks now of paperwork and meetings as everyone crawled out of the woodwork and warmed a chair. Rascher was already spinning his yarn; Jennifer had been kidnapped by Nonsystem. By their own personal maniac cop. And then Rascher had tracked her down, found her through an unfortunate — but lucky — coincidence. Philomena Argon’s death. Which they would no doubt pin on Nonsystem, too. They’d find a way to make it stick. They’d implicate Staryles again, their stalking horse. Now the Senate Intelligence Committee would gather tomorrow, posture and congratulate themselves instead of demanding any kind of real investigation.

  It had been a sting without any sting. Nonsystem had embraced her willingly, had brought her in and shared their beliefs with her, what they thought was happening. Something they even had a pile of documentation to corroborate, too. Why? Why had they let her in? And how were the Justice Department and the feds going to reconcile all of the IMF data?

  She turned and looked at the house. She watched as a second wave of FBI walked out of the house, carrying armloads of wireless devices and data drives, resembling some twisted version of shoppers on Black Friday, but in white gloves.

  You know now, Gentian had said.

  They weren’t. They were going to abscond with it. Every documented example of malfeasance, corruption, wrongful conviction, abuse of power, money laundering, bribery and coercion. Political sc
andals from Lawrence Taber through to Philip Largo, from mayors up to the President. Classified documents and memos which together formed a terrible picture of a bloated empire. Seized by the FBI.

  “Power has been going on and off all night,” she said softly. “And the internet is down.”

  “Parlor tricks.” Rascher sniffed and looked away. “It’s what they’re playing at. These kids are tapped into major security systems. They’re going down.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “That’s normal,” Rascher quipped instantly, as if he’d been waiting for her to say something like this. “It’s totally natural to form some kind of sympathies in a situation like this. Stockholm syndrome. You can’t help but get taken in a little; there’s just a lot of conviction there.” Rascher spoke like he was the preeminent expert on the subject.

  They took me in willingly, she wanted to scream at him. But, the screaming part was over. She watched the vehicles jockeying to turn around and get out of the cramped space. It would’ve almost been comical in another context. Something you’d see in a romantic comedy that involved a wedding, and there was a scene when everyone left the wedding and got into matching SUVs and couldn’t get their fat asses turned around to leave.

  Stopping and starting in jerky three-point turns. The young agents at the wheels bristling with adrenaline at their first big sting. Taillights winking on and off. Down though the canal of trees, at the end of the dirt driveway, the neighbors would be surely gathering, watching as the dark vehicles with their blacked-out windows drove by, wondering who was inside.

  Rascher was bent over his phone, frowning at what was on the screen. “Jesus,” he muttered. Then he poked a few buttons and put the phone to his ear, making a call.

  “What?”

  “Healy. Just jumped three agents in Penn Station. He’s on a train headed somewhere. Not sure where.” Rascher raised his eyebrows at her. “Any ideas?”