by Jack Soren
“Please! She’s just a—” Emily’s pleas were cut off by a kick to her side.
“Bring me the girl.”
“What about Burrows?” the underling asked, looking at his partner. “I think she might have killed Neill.”
George didn’t even hesitate. “Kill her.” The screen went blank. George was gone, along with Emily’s chances of saving Natalie.
And that was it. It was over. The sin she’d committed years ago returned in full.
The man pulled out a gun and turned toward Emily.
At least I’ll be first, she thought. Standing by and watching it all go down again was something she just couldn’t take.
Emily closed her eyes and braced herself for the shot. A crash reached her ears, and she flinched before she realized it wasn’t a gunshot. She opened her eyes and saw that her front windows had shattered into the flat; two ropes were hanging on their sills, left behind by the two new masked men standing before her. These men looked different—more professional. They were wearing body armor, and each held an automatic weapon, red beams slicing from their sights. They instantly targeted the other masked man and the one on the floor, efficiently putting a staccato hail of bullets into each one’s head.
“Clear!” one of the men shouted after checking the entire flat.
“We’re clear, sir,” the other one said, even though he wasn’t wearing an earpiece.
Her front door opened, and a well-dressed man with incredibly shiny black shoes walked over to where Emily was huddled and crouched beside her.
“Can you hear me, Miss Denham? Are you all right?” The man said, using her real name.
Before she could answer, the murkiness grabbed her and pulled her down into unconsciousness, the idea of Jonathan and Lew—mostly Lew—being safe allowing her to let go. She pictured Lew’s face one final time before everything was gone.
Chapter Three
Houston, Texas
12:02 P.M. Local Time
THE HELICOPTER SWUNG in from the east. Per Broden stood by his rental car dressed in a tan-wool trench coat over a matching three-piece suit and perfectly knotted brown bow tie. He held his briefcase in one black-gloved hand, his other hand hung, ungloved, by his side as he waited.
His journey had started over thirty-six hours ago in a place where his attire made more sense. Stockholm, Sweden, his home since he was a boy, was almost fifty-one hundred miles from the spot where Per was currently rooted. At fifty-four, he still called it home though in all those years, he’d traveled the world several times over.
The helicopter was only fifty feet off the ground when it stopped its arc above the scrub grass that stretched as far as the eye could see. It rocked for a moment, then descended to the desert floor, blowing Per’s thinning dirty blond hair from its perfect side part down over his round-lensed spectacles, dust following the wind and peppering Per. He remained still.
When the chopper finally came to rest, Per reached up with his free hand and swept his hair back into place.
A man in jeans, a blue-checked button-down shirt and black cowboy hat stepped from the chopper. Holding his hat in place and bending slightly to avoid the rotor blades, he jogged to where Per was waiting.
“You Broden?” he said with a thick Texas accent.
Per took a business card from his inside vest pocket and handed it to the man: “Per Broden, International Investigations.”
The man read the card, shrugged and handed it back to Per, who pocketed it.
“Name’s Green. Hank Green,” the man said, wiping sweat off his brow with one forearm. “Jesus, you must be hotter than a four-balled tomcat in that getup. I work for Mr. Harcourt. He’s waiting up at the main house.” Hank eyed Per’s briefcase. “Mind if I take a look?”
“Yes, I do,” Per said, the first words out of his mouth in almost two days.
Hank jerked back slightly at the refusal. “Look, amigo. Either you let me look in that case and frisk you, or this meeting ends before it starts.”
“I understand,” Per said.
“Good. Now if you’ll—”
“Good day,” Per said as he turned and opened the car door.
“Whoa, hang on,” Hank said, grabbing Per’s arm. Per continued into the car as if nothing was stopping him. Hank looked surprised that Per wasn’t as weak as he appeared. It was a look Per was well acquainted with.
“Tell Mr. Harcourt I hope he solves his mystery. Now please back up,” Per said.
“All right, all right,” Hank said. “I won’t look in it. Can you at least leave it in the car?”
“Yes, that would be acceptable,” Per said. He placed his briefcase on the passenger seat and rejoined Hank.
“Should I bother to try to frisk you?” Hank asked with a smirk.
“It would not be wise,” Per said flatly.
“Huh. You’re an odd one, ain’t cha?”
“That would be an accurate assessment, yes.”
They climbed into the helicopter, buckled themselves in, and, a few moments later, they were airborne. Per sat straight in his seat, neither looking out the window nor avoiding the view. He simply wasn’t interested in it. What he was interested in was why his new employer hadn’t been here to meet Per himself.
“Mr. Harcourt doesn’t leave the house much these days,” Hank said, apparently anticipating Per’s question. “He’s taking these attacks personally. But you can’t really blame him.”
Per nodded slightly and waited for more information.
“To be honest, he thinks someone is trying to kill him. Figgers the words left behind is just a smoke screen to draw him out.”
Per raised an eyebrow and turned to look at Hank. This was why he was here.
“And what do you think, Mr. Green?” Per asked.
“Me?” Hank said, surprised. “Hell, I ain’t paid to think!” He slapped Per’s shoulder as he laughed a loud, hacking laugh.
Per believed him.
Thirty minutes later, a large, ranch-style house appeared on the horizon, surrounded by a barn and a corral filled with horses. They landed in the front yard as workers fought to control the spooked horses. Per followed Hank out and up to the front door.
Hank started to open the door, but then stopped and turned to Per, concern in his eyes.
“You have to help him, Broden. It was all I could do to get him to meet with someone. He’s a real mess. I may work for him, but he’s the best friend I ever had, and it kills me that I can’t do nothin’ for him.”
Per waited, then realized they weren’t going to pass through the door until he responded verbally.
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. Green,” Per said. It was the truth. Per was actually incapable of doing any less. But truth be told, he couldn’t care less about a rich Texan’s sudden phobias. He was here for one thing and one thing only—the puzzle.
As a child in Stockholm, Per’s brother Peter had been kidnapped by a serial killer. The killer taunted Per’s family for weeks with riddles and unsolvable clues. In the end, his brother was killed. Per had thought at the time that if he’d just been smarter, more clever, better at puzzles, he could have saved Peter. Despite reassurances from his parents, the authorities, and several therapists over the years, Per still blamed himself for Peter’s death.
Since then, he’d spent his life solving puzzles; first for the police and now freelance as an investigator. Per would never let himself feel that way again. He’d rather die than fail.
Every time Per solved a case, he felt like he’d made an atonement to his murdered brother. A drop in a bucket that would never be full.
Per followed Hank into the house, and he suddenly felt like he was only a few kilometers from home. Despite the mansion’s exterior, the interior was decorated in classic European designs rather than what one expected of a Texas estate. The space was
immense, easily fifteen meters high with an expanse more like an auditorium than a living room. The floor was cream-colored marble, brown diamond shapes inset where the large tiles met. The furnishings were green and gold and crimson. Staircases ran up the walls on both sides of the room, large paintings resting on the wall wherever a landing occurred. Against the far wall was a fireplace with more furniture arranged around it. In the corner was a grand piano just a few feet from a dining-room table covered in a deep red tablecloth and surrounded by fourteen chairs. In the center of the room was a large plant on top of a working fountain, gurgling away.
They walked to the fountain, and Hank asked Per to wait. He went up one of the staircases and was gone for almost half an hour, his absence accompanied by echoing shouts. Finally, he returned, and asked Per to follow him upstairs. At the end of a long corridor, they entered an office bigger than Per’s entire house.
The office was decorated as extravagantly as the rest of the house, but a foggy sheen seemed to obscure the brilliance. The leather sofa against the wall held rumpled pillows and a blanket, and there were more than a few empty beer bottles along the floor beside it. From the smell, Per doubted that Harcourt had left anytime recently.
At the end of the room, slumped behind a wide desk covered with food trays and open books, James Harcourt sat dressed in a green-plaid bathrobe. Per could see a shiny silver .44 Magnum revolver lying in front of Harcourt along with a mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and several half-empty bottles of pills.
Harcourt was a big man with a wild, unkempt beard. Even seated, Per could tell that Harcourt was taller than he, but since he was only five-nine, that didn’t say a whole lot.
“Mr. Broden, this is James Harcourt,” Hank said before fading into the background. Per stepped in front of the desk and waited for his host to speak. Or, to at least acknowledge he was there. Five minutes later, he got his wish.
“Jesus! Where’d you come from?” Harcourt slurred, grabbing his gun and pushing back in his overstuffed brown-leather office chair. The only thing that kept Per rooted to his spot was that despite his antics, Harcourt had yet to point his gun anywhere but at the floor.
“He’s the Swedish detective,” Hank said, floating into the scene again. “You sent for him, Jim. Remember?” Hank looked at Per apologetically.
This was not what Per had expected. When the first cryonics facility had been bombed, and the first occurrence of the enigmatic “Dead Lights” phrase had been scrawled onto the pavement, Per had read about it on the Internet. He’d immediately contacted Harcourt with an offer to investigate. After several more bombings and even more e-mail exchanges, Harcourt had finally acquiesced and invited Per for a meeting. But the man Per had communicated with online had been articulate and wary. Not the self-indulgent, ready-to-surrender figure before him.
Harcourt looked at Hank, then back at Per. A long moment stretched out as the big man’s eyes fought to focus.
“Right. Right,” Harcourt said, seeming to just now notice that he was holding his gun. “Jesus, sorry . . . Broden, is it?” Per nodded as Harcourt put the gun back on the desk before swallowing down more pills with the whiskey. “Sit down, sit down.”
Per obliged. Harcourt shook his head and grunted, apparently trying to clear his head.
“The pictures, Jim. Show him the pictures,” Hank said before taking a seat against the wall, holding his hat in his lap.
“Uh. Right, the pictures.”
Harcourt picked up a stack of eight-by-ten photos from his desk. He looked at them before turning his attention back to Per.
“It started a few weeks ago,” Harcourt said, handing Per one of the photos. Per took it from him. It was a picture of what had once been a building, now half-missing and all burned. On the remaining brickwork in front of the structure were the words “Dead Lights.” It was from a different angle, but this was the image Per had seen on the Internet that had first drawn his interest to the mystery.
“What am I looking at?” Per asked, willing to play whatever game Harcourt was selling. To a point.
“How much do you know about me, Broden?”
“Not much,” Per lied. If he hadn’t known everything there was to know about Harcourt, he never would have gotten on the plane to come here.
Harcourt had made his money like most millionaires in Texas—in oil. But he’d gotten out of the black-gold business years ago. Since then, he’d been interested in one thing and one thing alone—life extension. In every capacity.
Toward that interest, he had created the Crystasis Foundation. The rumors in the life-extension chat rooms Per had frequented before coming here were that, in truth, Harcourt was only interested in finding ways to extend his own life. Per thought it made sense that someone who was business savvy wouldn’t experiment on himself but find a way to experiment on others until he found what he was looking for. And Per thought the influx of capital from people willing to pay hundreds of thousands for even a shot at more life wouldn’t hurt either. But the facilities where Harcourt stored frozen corpses with the hope that one day they could be thawed and cured of what killed them was just part of his longevity empire.
“Look around you, Broden. It looks like I have everything a man could want, doesn’t it?”
“Some men.”
“I’ve been lucky. I have enough money for several lifetimes. The problem, of course, is that I don’t have several lifetimes. Like everyone else, I have just one. I can’t change that. But I can make the one life I do have long. Really long.” He took a long pull on the bottle and wiped his mouth with his forearm.
Per just looked at him.
“That used to be one of my life-extension facilities. There used to be seven of them around the world. Here, South Africa, Europe . . . even had one in Russia. Most of them are just repositories, but I’ve got a research lab up in Toronto too.”
“You used to have seven?”
Harcourt tossed three more photos on the desk in front of Per. “Over the past few weeks, there have been bombings at three of my facilities. No warning, no explanation. Just that goddamn message on the bricks in front of the ashes.
“I’ve beefed up the security at my other facilities, but I don’t want to just be safe. If a coyote is taking your herd, you don’t build a bigger fence; you kill the mongrel.”
Per looked at the photos for a while longer, then put them down in a neat pile on the desk. He leaned back and brushed some hairs from his suit.
“The only leads we’ve got are this man and this security camera picture.” Harcourt handed Per two final photos.
Per examined the first photo. It was of a thin, bearded man in a lab coat. The word “Crystasis” CRYSTASIS was embroidered across the lab coat’s breast. Beneath was a name tag: “Dr. Reese.” He put the picture with the others.
“Up until six months ago, Dr. Chris Reese worked out of my lab in Toronto on special projects,” Harcourt said.
“What happened six months ago?”
“He just up and disappeared. Poof. He didn’t resign or, as far as my inquiries could tell, take a job anywhere else. He emptied his bank account and walked away from his house. No mortgage payments or other bills have been paid since then. A few months later, the attacks started.”
Per turned his attention to the final picture. It was dark, the only source of light the flames from the burning building in the background. He squinted and could just make out a figure on a motorcycle. The shape of the skintight leather and the hair splaying back from the rider’s helmet told him the rider was female, and probably young.
“That was taken by a warehouse security camera just up the road from the first facility that was attacked minutes after the alarm went out to the fire department. We enhanced the photo as much as we could without washing out the details. Afraid that’s the best we could do.”
Per put
the photo down on the pile, looking up at Harcourt. He examined the man for a few long moments, Harcourt seeming uncomfortable under Per’s gaze. If not for the booze and pills, Per would have probed the discomfort further.
“Why me?” Per asked, finally.
“I heard what you did in Spain last year,” Harcourt said, glancing at Per’s one gloved hand. “You’re the man for the job, all right.”
Per understood why Harcourt had looked into his past, but he didn’t like it. There was too much there to find.
“As I said in my correspondence, my fee is one hundred thousand dollars and expenses. Deposited to this account,” Per said, holding out a business card with his bank account transfer information on it. Harcourt just looked at it. Hank got up and took it from Per before returning to the sofa.
“I’ll need full access,” Per said.
“You’ll have it,” Harcourt said. He reached in a drawer and took out a passcard. He tossed it to Per. “This will get you into all my facilities. And this should take care of your expenses.” Harcourt tossed another card onto the desk. This one was a credit card. It was black. “No limit. And you can use it at any ATM for as much cash as you need. Passcode is L-I-F-E. 5433,” Harcourt said, taking another drink.
“You are being very trusting, Mr. Harcourt,” Per said. The implication was, how do you know I won’t rob you blind?
“As I said, Broden, the one thing I do have is money. And my horse sense. You hold your cards pretty close to your chest, but I can tell I can trust you.”
Per simply looked at him, wondering what the drunk would say if he knew that Per had no intention of killing anyone for him—unless they got in his way, of course. Per would solve the Dead Lights mystery—what it meant and what the bomber was trying to achieve—and then move on to his next puzzle. The answers were all that mattered to Per. All that would ever matter to him. He’d trade his life for those answers—his and anyone else’s.
Per stood up, pocketed the cards, and picked up the photos.
“I’ll solve your riddle, Mr. Harcourt,” Per said.
