Flee the Night

by Susan May Warren

  Sarah awoke and shot a questioning look at Conner. He shook his head, and her face fell. “Sarah, would you mind riding with Hank or Dannette?”

  Lacey wasn’t surprised when she opted for the lady’s truck. Conner slid Emily into the middle of his cab and buckled her in. Lacey climbed in beside her, holding her close. When Conner pulled away, leading the caravan, she stared into the dark forest and felt her worst fears unhinge.

  She’d killed Jim Micah.

  She pulled her daughter tight and closed her eyes. Conner said nothing. Lacey didn’t know whether his silence stemmed from fury or a desire to protect her.

  As if she deserved protection.

  The ride to Poplar Bluff seemed like a blink. They arrived just as sunlight emblazoned the store windows. Lacey cradled Emily in her arms and trudged up to the motel room.

  Dannette said nothing as she opened the door to the women’s room and let them inside. After Lacey tucked Emily into one of the double beds, she sat at the end and hung her head in her hands. She felt empty. Like a hole had been scooped out of her chest where her heart had once been. She began to shake, forced herself to settle down, and walked over to the sink. She splashed water on her face, then scrubbed it hard with a towel.

  She heard Dannette leave, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  Lacey slid down into a ball, knees up, and buried her head in her arms. I’m so, so sorry, Micah. I told you; didn’t I tell you? Her eyes burned.

  From across the room, her cell phone trilled.

  She leaped for it, crawling then finding her feet and digging it out on the third ring.

  TEN TONIGHT.

  TUNNEL BLUFF CAVE.

  NO COMPANY.

  BRING THE REAL EX-6.

  OR JIM MICAH DIES.

  She stared at the message with a mixture of euphoria and disbelief. Micah was still alive, right? Hope felt too raw, but she closed her eyes and held on anyway. Please, God, don’t let Micah pay for my mistakes. This time she didn’t care if she didn’t deserve to throw her requests at God. Micah deserved it.

  She got up, checked her daughter, then headed for the door. Conner was leaning against the outside rail, talking to Dannette in low tones. Their conversation must have been serious because they stopped talking, and Conner straightened, frowning. “What?”

  “He’s alive. And they want the real Ex-6. Or they’re going to kill him.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “I know.” She looked down at the text message. “I’m not going to let them kill Micah.”

  “I mean, giving them the real Ex-6.” Conner crossed his arms. “I can’t let you do that. Micah and I had a chitchat before we left. He told me that under no circumstances was I to let you hand over Ex-6. Ever.”

  Lacey stared at him, seeing the soldier he’d once been.

  “Micah swore to protect his country with his life. And he’ll do that. He would die before he’d let another country tap into America’s secrets.” Conner narrowed his eyes. “I would think you took the same oath.”

  Lacey glanced at Dannette, who wore a half frown. “I did. But I can’t let them kill Micah … I love him.”

  “You have a fine way of showing it,” Dannette said.

  “Excuse me, but do you know anything about this? Do you know that I tried to leave him three times, that I practically begged him not to come along?”

  “If you know anything about Jim, he doesn’t take no for an answer. A better option would have been not to drag him into this at all. You don’t put a person’s life in danger if you love him.”

  Lacey clenched her jaw, but she couldn’t help noticing pain and guilt roaming in Dannette’s eyes. She might love Micah, but Lacey had a low, gut feeling that there was something more behind the way Dannette’s eyes filmed over. Dannette held her shaking hand to her mouth and turned away.

  “She’s just … well, Dannette knows what it is to lose someone,” Conner said.

  Dannette turned back, and tears furrowed her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Lacey. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I’m just afraid for Micah. But inside I know he would be so overjoyed that you have Emily back. That would be enough for him.” She put her hand to her mouth again. “Forgive me.”

  Words left Lacey. How could Dannette even consider apologizing to Lacey when she was the one who had made the mistakes? Dannette was right. If she loved Micah, why had she called him? “I … uh, of course.” She frowned, watching Dannette shuffle along the deck to the stairs.

  Conner watched her go. “You can’t hand over Ex-6.”

  Lacey folded her arms, leaned against the railing. “What am I going to do, Conner?” She heard the despair in her voice but didn’t care. “I’m trapped. I’ve loved Micah so long he’s embedded in my heart. I can’t let him die. John’s death tore me apart. Micah’s would destroy me.”

  Conner touched her arm, and something in his expression felt like Micah. Strong. Wise. “There has to be an answer. And maybe God led you to us to help you find it.”

  She studied him. A young man, maybe in his early thirties. He had lines of stress around his eyes, betraying that maybe he’d seen too much in his life. Sarah too wore the expression of strain. And Dannette seemed acquainted with grief. Again, she considered that yes, maybe God had sent her to Micah’s Team Hope. Proving that … what? God still cared? The idea left her mouth dry.

  Lacey licked her lips and nodded. “Okay. I have an idea.”

  Chapter 19

  “WHY DO THEY call you Sparks?” Lacey was bent over Conner’s keyboard, typing.

  “Oh, just a wee bit of magic I did while in training at Robin Sage,” Conner answered from his perch on his bunk in the back of his truck. “We were trying to get a sat link, but our equipment was damaged. We snuck into the terrorist’s camp, and I snatched their shortwave. But while I was soldering wires to the board, I sort of … started a small fire that turned into a major conflagration that ended with us getting caught.”

  When she glanced at him, he shrugged but wore a grin. “Anyway, the name stuck. I’m pretty good at communications though.”

  “I see that.” She pulled the rabbit’s foot off her track pants and snapped it apart.

  “Is that one of those micro hard drives?”

  “Yeah. A USB pendant. It’s got the Ex-6 program on it.” She plugged it into his USB port.

  “Why did you give the kidnapper the CD-ROM?” “Because it can get lost … or damaged, right?” She smirked. “Now the other little gem.” She extracted a small compact from her bag.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Conner reached over, as if mesmerized.

  “Don’t touch. It’s a prototype. PCMCIA card, aka the Ex-6 hardware. It attaches to your external plug-in port.” She found the fitting for the PCMCIA slot, then plugged in the card. “Voilà, instant enigma machine.” The program loaded, and she plugged her telephone via a cable into another USB port.

  “Why didn’t you give the guy that?”

  “He didn’t ask for it.” Again, she smiled.

  “Micah should have trusted you,” Conner said starkly.

  Lacey’s heart dropped an inch. “Yeah, well, he had his reasons. Besides, I’m fully planning to give them what they asked for, so don’t forgive me too fast.”

  “But what I don’t get is if you do, doesn’t the NSA have a copy of the program, rendering the copy you give these guys useless?”

  “No. Not if their purpose in sending the information is to see who’s watching,” Lacey answered. “Even if the NSA did use their copy of Ex-6 to pull apart the messages, the sender would know that the message had been compromised. And this would be enough to keep the sender out of NSA’s sights or whoever else might be trailing them.”

  “So the value is more in the fact that they can assess who is watching and take appropriate precautions.”

  “Virtually making whoever is using it impossible to find.”

  “Especially if the whoever is already a rogue and a deadly terrorist
group like Hayata.”

  “Which makes the fact that Ishmael Shavik tailed me all these years downright chilling.” Lacey finished downloading her messages from the telephone onto Ex-6.

  “But you’re still giving them Ex-6?” Conner’s eyes glinted.

  Lacey couldn’t look at him. “I have no choice.”

  He took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s just assume for a second that I’m going to let you do that. What’s your brilliant plan?”

  “I’m hoping to use the Ex-6 decryption program to uncover the source code from these text messages and maybe trace it back to its original IP. It might lead to some answers, some way to outflank them.”

  “If the messages were sent from a computer.”

  “If they were sent from a cell phone, we’ll get the originating number. From there, we can trace it to the right owner.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Quite the setup you have here.”

  “Digital television, wireless connections. I keep improving it.”

  “Why did you leave the commandos? Micah said you were one of his best men.”

  A shadow crossed Conner’s face. He looked away, and for the second time she saw a facet of Conner that wasn’t dead serious or all games. Grief. It nearly consumed his expression. She swallowed, recognizing the hues.

  “My brother was murdered a year ago. I came home to settle his affairs on leave and decided not to re-up.”

  Lacey frowned, knowing there was more but deciding not to pry. Again, it niggled at her that God may have picked this group—one comprised of members who had their own secrets—for a reason. But digging for that reason might take more time and energy than she could muster with Micah fighting for his life because of her. “Did they catch the person who did it?”

  Conner stared at his feet, his lips pursed. “I don’t know if they ever will. The case is pretty cold. They think it was a drug shooting, but I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too.” He gave her a slight smile. “Micah told me about Kazakhstan. About John.”

  Lacey studied the keyboard. “I figured he did. Your expression all but blared it in the café. Did Micah also tell you I was accused of murdering my husband?”

  “Yeah. Micah looked into it for a while, he said. But then he got a call telling him you were guilty and to keep out of it.”

  Lacey nodded. “I called him.”

  Conner went very, very still.

  “I knew he was getting too close. John believed that there was someone inside the company we were working for who was compromising our agents. There were two killed the month before John in an operation very similar to ours where industrial secrets were sold. I admit, my suspicions ran more toward the man we supposedly worked for, but either way, I didn’t want Micah ending up a casualty too. Especially if I was wrong. I was afraid if Micah got in too deep, he’d start making that someone mad.”

  “And get killed.” Conner searched her eyes.

  She nodded, and her throat felt thick. “So much for my good intentions.”

  “Micah also said you have a black hole where your faith was.”

  She flinched. “That was especially nice of him.”

  Conner gave her a half grin. “Well, he was trying to show you he loved you by going in your place to the cave. But, well, I guess that backfired.”

  Lacey just stared at him, blinking. Micah loved her? “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “I don’t know, Lacey. Maybe he thought actions were better than words.”

  “The sad part is that I knew that. Deep in my heart, I knew he loved me. But I accused him of being an ice man—void of feelings.”

  “He’s got feelings. Just has a hard time vocalizing them.”

  Her throat prickled. “I don’t deserve him. I’ve made so many mistakes. Since the day Micah walked away from me at my senior prom, I’ve been trying to get his attention, prove my life was better without him. I’ve only made a mess of it. And now I’m trapped. Even if he gets out of this, I still have shadows. Secrets. I’m shackled to my mistakes.”

  The look of pity on Conner’s face made her want to cringe. “I know. That’s the thing, Lacey—we all do. That’s what being a sinner is all about. We can’t help but make mistakes. And we wind up shackled to them, paying the price. But Jesus unlocks those prisons. Isaiah 61 says that Jesus came to release us from darkness. It’s more than just salvation—it’s restoration. I think of a dungeon. There we are, sitting in our filth, wasting away, and Jesus flings open that door, comes into our prison, despite our stench, lifts us up, and carries us up the stairs to the sunlight.”

  She pictured it, how it might feel to be picked up and carried out. She flinched when she saw her wounds, her filth, her stench revealed, nearly overpowering, as she reached the daylight.

  “It doesn’t end there,” Conner continued. He leaned forward, his hands clasped. “Isaiah says that God gives us beauty for ashes, joy instead of mourning, praise instead of despair. It’s not just salvation; it’s transformation. It’s God redeeming our reputation, giving us overflowing mirth in our hearts, clothing us with a countenance of rejoicing instead of grief. We are not merely set free; we’re washed and given an entire new body, an entire new life.

  “That’s what Jesus meant when He said, ‘I—yes, I alone—am the one who blots out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again.’ You are completely new in His eyes because of His amazing love for you.”

  Completely new. Lacey swallowed the burning ache to believe Conner’s words, to cry out like Micah said.

  “You can’t solve this by yourself. But God can. That’s what hope is all about. Letting God do what seems impossible.”

  There were so many impossibilities here, she didn’t know where to start asking. Or even if she should. As Lacey debated, she saw a dialog box appear on her screen. “We’re in.”

  Thankful to extricate herself from the feelings that threatened to swamp her, she typed in the keystrokes that would unlock the code. She’d designed the system to reveal both the transmission path, or source code, and the message. In this case, the message was decoded. But the source code scanned down two pages. Lacey scrolled to the bottom. “This is from a government server.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Whoever sent this routed it through a government IP. I recognize the subnet address.”

  “You think it’s someone in … what? The Department of Defense? The NSA?”

  Lacey shook her head. “I’ve thought of that more than once. Like, why didn’t the kidnapper ask for the prototype? Anyone who knows anything about quantum encryption knows you need software and hardware.” That omission had been bothering her for more than three days. Ex-6 was useless without the prototype, which the NSA didn’t know she had. She’d developed her own in the NSA lab and given them a copy, while smuggling out the original. Gut-instinct insurance.

  “Is it operational?” Director Berg had asked her in the hospital. She’d answered yes. And after that she had received the kidnapping call.…

  She opened up a new page. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard as she considered obliterating her last wall of defense. Once she went online, she would trigger a NSA trace—one that could lead Roland Berg right to her doorstep. She had no illusions that this time the NSA wouldn’t stop with flimsy handcuffs and a don’t-worry-we’ll-be-nice speech.

  Lacey took a deep breath, then logged on to the Internet, typed in the keystrokes, and accessed an online data-storage cache. “In the early days, I did some of my work at NSA HQ and learned how the government server cycles its passwords. I wrote a program to assess them.”

  She watched Conner’s computer download a program from the cache. “It’ll get us in the server, and I can take a look around.”

  Conner stared at her with a look of pure wonder. “Okay, who are you?”

  Lacey grinned. “I have a PhD in a couple subjects. That helps. But in your world, I’m a hacker. A good one.”

&
nbsp; “I knew I liked you.” He stood behind her, one hand on the back of her chair.

  The program opened, and two minutes later Lacy was inside the server. “Every message has a message ID. And those identities are stored in an ID log.” She scrolled down the list of message ID numbers, looking for her message. “Here.” She pointed to the screen. A few keystrokes later, she read the user ID: FHillman.

  Frank Hillman. She fought her quickening breath.

  “Who is F. Hillman?” Conner asked, unaware that her world was sliding out from under her feet. She knew it. In the pit of her stomach, she knew she’d been correct.

  “More importantly,” Lacey said in a quiet voice, “why would Frank Hillman have an IP address inside a NSA server?”

  “And Frank Hillman is …?”

  “He was my boss in Kuwait. I thought he was a businessman, but in my heart I knew he was an international thief and a murderer. I think he framed me for John’s murder.”

  She noted Conner’s grim expression. “Let’s see what kind of mail he’s been sending, shall we?”

  She sorted the list according to user ID and discovered only three text messages. The ones he’d sent her. Frank Hillman obviously didn’t use this address for normal business correspondence.

  “Wait.” Conner tapped his finger on the screen. “Hillman Oil. The newspaper said the rig that caused the train wreck was from Hillman Oil.”

  Lacey paused. “Okay, let’s search Hillman Oil.” She googled the name. A listing came back. She scrolled down it and opened a few pages of information. “His company’s grown. I thought it was destroyed after the Kazakhstan incident. It’s worldwide now.”

  “Pakistan. Afghanistan. Kazakhstan.”

  She glanced at Conner. “A Korean man chased me through the woods.…”

  “Look at this one.” Conner gestured to a link on the screen.

  Lacey opened it and read: Hillman named to EPA Congressional Committee for consideration of gasification laws. She closed her eyes, pinched her nose with her fingers. “It can’t be.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “This is unthinkable.”