“Spooky.”
“I’m glad they were there. I might have bled out otherwise.”
“Holy shit, Sam. It was that serious?”
“My side is killing me. I’m afraid to look at the stitches.”
Dan was quiet for a moment, churning the facts over in his head. “Anything else they said?”
“They were very coy,” Sam said. “But the accent was strange. They were definitely fluent in Hungarian, but there were overtones. The consonants were familiar in a strange way. Out of context, maybe. But I couldn’t place it, and I couldn’t tell you why it sounded familiar.”
“Non-native Hungarians in Budapest, secretly playing for the good guys,” Dan said. “With such a running start, I should have this figured out in a minute or two.”
“Smartass.”
“Seriously, that’s not very much to go on. Are you sure you need to know who they are?”
“I think so,” Sam said. “Somebody told them exactly where to find me. I’d like to know who.”
“You make a compelling point,” Dan said. “But it’s going to be tough. There’s not much of anything to work with.”
“I’ll text you the coordinates of the building. I don’t know how useful the location will be, but it might help you to cross-reference a database somewhere.”
“Sure. I’ll ask the Great Database in the Sky,” Dan quipped. “The all-seeing, all-knowing Cloud.”
“Something like that.”
Another thought struck. “The guy who attacked me was Slavic,” Sam said. “Just like the guy in 32A.”
“Perfect. Another nonspecific clue. That should keep me running in circles for weeks.”
“Sorry,” Sam said. “But if I knew more, I probably wouldn’t need you.”
“Touché.”
“And I need a favor.”
“Another one?”
“Are you keeping track?”
“Yes. Christmas bonus. Sarah wants a new minivan.”
“Lucky you,” Sam said, peering into a darkened entryway as she passed. “I need you to talk to Tom Davenport for me, please. Bring him up to date. Tell him about the blood stains in Severn’s room, about me being tailed and attacked, and about the mystery team coming to my rescue.”
“Why can’t you tell him all that?”
“I can. But I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s hard to disobey orders you never receive.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s going to order me home, for that eyes-only thing. But the situation here is a long way from right.”
Dan laughed. “You’re something else. You’re alone in a foreign city, and someone’s got a target painted on your back. Don’t you want a little help?”
“From Davenport?” Sam snorted. “With my taxes, maybe. But with this? No fucking way.”
Sam’s senses were on high alert. The sun had just peeked over the horizon in the east, and the light was poor for picking out tails and overly interested eyeballs.
Dan was right. Rogue and alone wasn’t a winning combination, especially five thousand miles away from home.
But she had an extremely important question to answer, so she pressed on as quickly as her sore side would allow. She rounded a corner and caught sight of the hospital.
It was named after Dr. Rose Magánkórház, someone Sam had never heard of. She had envisioned a giant American-style medical megalith, so the small, squat structure caught her off guard. It looked as though the building had been a small European barn in an earlier incarnation.
Her side hurt as she walked up the front stairway. The anesthetic was wearing off. She wondered how much speed and stamina she would have available in case of another encounter with her new fans, who were undoubtedly less than pleased about their ranks having been thinned by one.
A tired-looking reception nurse greeted her. Sam asked whether she spoke English. The nurse’s expression grew more tired. “Of course,” she said.
Sam displayed her Homeland badge and did her best to explain the situation. She needed to see Mark Severn’s body.
The nurse was less than impressed. “Family members only in the morgue,” she said.
“I’m Mr. Severn’s colleague,” Sam said, “and I’ve been sent here to take care of the details. I won’t be able to return home until I’ve had a look at his remains.”
The nurse sighed. She turned, pulled open a file cabinet drawer, leafed through reams of paperwork, and produced a form, which she handed to Sam.
The form was written in Hungarian, with small English subtitles. The English translation seemed to have been done by someone who didn’t speak English, Sam thought. It made no sense to her. She prevailed upon the nurse to help her fill in the blank items. She wrote illegibly and fabricated answers to a few of the more obscure questions.
The nurse lost patience halfway way through the form. “It’s okay,” she said. “Come with me.”
Sam followed down a long hallway. There must have been an annex not visible from the street, Sam surmised, because the hallway appeared too long to be contained inside the small barn-like structure she had seen from the front. She wondered if there was a parking lot in the back of the building. She wondered if it was visible from the roadway. She was already thinking tactically about her exit.
The nurse swiped a badge through a reader on the wall. There was a beep and a green light, then an audible click as the latch released. The nurse held the door for Sam, then repeated the procedure at the next doorway, which opened into the refrigerated morgue. Sam asked about the heightened security measures. “Organ trafficking,” the nurse said.
“It’s a messed-up world,” Sam said.
The nurse shrugged. She cross-referenced the sheet on a clipboard dangling from a nail, then pulled open one of the long, heavy steel drawers lining the long wall. She unzipped the body bag, and opened it to give Sam a view of the head and torso.
Sam steeled herself. She had seen plenty of corpses, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it. She looked into the drawer.
A senescent face greeted her. Gray hair, wrinkles, a double chin.
It was certainly a dead body.
But it was certainly not Mark Severn.
14
David Swaringen felt groggy when his alarm went off. There was no way he was going to get used to the early mornings, he figured.
He started a pot of coffee, climbed into the shower, and let the hot water spill over him.
Yesterday wasn’t quite the first day he had wanted. He wasn’t sure what his boss thought of him. Clark Barter, the grizzled, crusty old DDO, was tough to read. Swaringen wasn’t sure whether he was going to fit in at the National Security Agency. More specifically, he wondered whether he was going to fit in on the Penumbra operations floor.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Something bothered him about Barter. There was something broken, Swaringen thought, something not quite right. He wasn’t sure what, but behind bluff, bluster, and bravado inevitably hid a scared person. Swaringen wondered what Barter was scared of.
Swaringen knew what he was scared of. Swaringen was scared of Barter.
He hoped things went a little more smoothly today.
He finished getting dressed, straightened his tie, grabbed his briefcase, and began his commute. Today was a new day, he decided. It was going to be a better day.
And all things considered, Swaringen thought as the first rush of caffeine-induced optimism hit him, his first day on the job hadn’t really been all that bad. Sure, he would have hoped for a more auspicious first impression, but in light of everything going on, it hadn’t been heinous. In the history of first days, this one wasn’t the worst, he decided.
Swaringen made his way toward the gigantic NSA complex in Fort Meade, Maryland. It was early enough that the normal DC-area madness had not yet begun. Swaringen almost didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed like a different town than the
one he was used to, a much better town. Maybe the early mornings weren’t going to be all that bad.
He felt a sense of opportunity. How many people got to be involved in the kinds of things he was getting to be involved with? How many people knew the things that he knew? Maybe a few hundred, he surmised, out of seven billion people on the planet. It was certainly a privileged and rarefied crowd. Swaringen didn’t feel as though he belonged yet, but it felt good just to have his foot in the door.
He hoped that Barter would warm to him over time. He hoped the environment didn’t turn out to be quite as hostile as it first seemed.
Something nagged at him. Why had everything gone sideways when he asked where yesterday’s events had gone down? It was as if he had asked permission to sleep with Barter’s daughter. It had seemed a colossal faux pas. Had he missed the memo?
Swaringen shook his head. At least the first day was in the books, he thought. And today’s a new opportunity.
The drive took less than half an hour. He parked his car in the shadow of the gigantic, gleaming NSA cube, grabbed his briefcase, and walked inside, fresh resolve in the set of his jaw.
He got lost on the way to Command Center Bravo. Just for a little while. Just long enough to make him late.
He badged into the secure room, walked across the operations floor, set his briefcase atop the desk, planted his backside on the seat next to Clark Barter. The old man made a point of glaring at his watch, a stern expression on his face.
Swaringen apologized “I should have left breadcrumbs when I went home yesterday,” he said.
His apology earned a chuckle from the old man. Swaringen considered it a small win.
He perused the monitors, moving his eyes methodically from screen to screen, taking in details. Each view was from above, at varying degrees of magnification. The scenery varied from sector to sector, and varied to a lesser degree from screen to screen. He surmised that each operator was responsible for a particular area.
He looked for a pattern, a common thread. There must be one, he reasoned. Something had to tie everything together. Everything in front of him had to make sense, from the right perspective. So it was just a matter of figuring out the right frame of reference.
He saw urban scenes, but he didn’t recognize any of the cities.
He saw rural scenes, but he saw no distinguishing landmarks.
He saw forests and bodies of water, but he didn’t recognize any of their shapes.
When there were cars, they were familiar-looking, but Swaringen didn’t place much stock in that. The same cars were sold just about everywhere in the world, with a bit of regional variation. It was the nature of globalization and consolidation.
His mind wandered and his eyes unfocused. His thoughts turned existential. Have I made the right career move? Am I enjoying this? Will I make it long enough to qualify for retirement?
Will I wind up an asshole like Clark Barter? A small smile crossed his lips.
And that’s when he noticed. It was a small thing, but momentous. It was barely noticeable, but once noticed, it couldn’t be ignored.
When viewed from a distance, the images revealed their coherence.
All the shadows pointed the same direction.
West.
All of the videos showed someplace in the Western Hemisphere.
Swaringen sat up. Was the US at war someplace in Central America? South America? Was it the war on drugs? Did anybody still call it that? Was there terrorist activity this close to home? Swaringen had no idea. And he had more sense than to ask.
But he resolved to find out.
15
Nero Jefferson Chiligiris sat glumly next to Robert the Muslim. They had spent the night in a putrid police station holding tank in Pueblo. Some kind of bureaucratic mix-up at the Florence facility prevented them from being accommodated as originally planned. The guard’s word, accommodated. Like he was some kind of concierge.
“Don’t worry,” the prisoner transport driver had said. “We’ll get it sorted out. You’ll be in there first thing in the morning.” There was a bit of wickedness to his smile.
Nero spent the night shoehorned between a drunk and two gang bangers. He half expected a shank between the ribs in his sleep. The drunk spared him by snoring too loudly to permit any shuteye whatsoever.
As each new guard passed by on watch, Nero asked the same question: “When do I get my phone call?”
The answer was always the same. “No phone call for you. You got a problem with it, take it up with the feds.”
Nero’s despair deepened. His hope of successfully pleading his case diminished with each passing hour. He worried about Penny and the kids. What must they be thinking?
And would it kill anybody to let him have just one phone call?
He felt drained. Losing hope was enervating.
Sunlight peeked through the high, narrow windows at the top of the holding cell. Nero’s eyes burned with exhaustion, and a low, dark mood settled over him. He saw the prison transport driver approach the cell with the local guard, and he sank into deeper despair.
“On the road again,” the driver sang with inappropriate glee. Nero cursed beneath his breath.
He and Robert shuffled in their manacles down the long hallway from the holding cell. They both noticed where the driver placed the keys to unlock their chains. Right front pants pocket. Not a terribly secure location, but it wasn’t like they were going to overpower the guard with their hands and feet shackled together.
The driver led them out into the early morning light. The fresh air taunted them. They struggled to climb into the van, arms and legs shackled together. “We’re burning daylight,” the driver prodded, with that slightly malicious laugh again.
The van bumped and jostled, stopped and started through a few intersections, then accelerated onto Highway 50, heading west to Florence. The sun peeked through the rear window of the van, first a bit of faint orange, then a blazing ball of crimson.
It reminded Nero of the outside world. The world he was no longer part of.
They continued westbound, away from the Pueblo gloom, past crack house after crack house, out again onto the Colorado plain.
“I guess this is it,” Nero said.
“Home of the free.”
Nero nodded glumly. He rested his head against the van frame, again feeling the hum of the road rattle through his skull, hoping for a few minutes’ rest before the nightmare continued.
The van swerved. Tires squealed. There was a thump, as of metal meeting flesh, and curses from the driver’s seat. Nero’s body was tossed against the seatbelt. The driver cursed loudly, manhandling the oversized steering wheel. Nero’s body lurched and lunged with the driver’s overcorrections.
There was a horrendous squeal of brakes, a loud, violent impact, the sound of twisting metal, then the ear-splitting screech of metal on pavement. Another vicious impact brought the van to an instant stop, slamming Nero’s weight against his lap belt.
An eerie silence settled over them.
Nero looked at Robert. No visible signs of damage. Just a stunned expression on the kid’s skinny face.
Nero unbuckled his seat belt, leaned forward, and looked through the window into the driver’s compartment.
The driver’s face was a bloody mess. One of his arms was bent and twisted at an impossible angle. Nero felt suddenly ill. His stomach threatened revolt. He was always squeamish around blood and guts. He turned away, looking out the side window instead, gathering himself.
What had they hit? If there was another car, Nero couldn’t see it. Had the driver just run off the road? Texting? Dodging an animal, maybe?
He looked out the windshield. He saw blood and fur. Maybe they’d hit a deer.
“What a trip, man,” Robert said. His voice was faint and far away. The wiry Muslim man still wore a shocked expression on his face, but there was no sign of blood or trauma.
Nero examined his own arms and legs. He felt no pain, except where
the seatbelt had dug into his lap. He was suddenly worried about an explosion. Everybody made fun of the way it happened all the time in the movies, but Nero was suddenly concerned that there might have been an element of truth to it. He didn’t want to have his skin roasted off if the van caught fire.
“Let’s get out of this thing,” he said.
Robert pointed to the back doors. “No door handles,” he said.
Nero cursed. He leaned forward and tried the window in the bulkhead separating the forward and aft compartments of the prisoner van. Locked.
He leaned back on the seat, raised both legs, and mule-kicked the window. The glass was thick, and reinforced by wires enmeshed between panes. Nero’s kick barely registered.
Nero cursed, clenched his jaw, and unleashed a fury of successive kicks. Hot pain flashed in his feet and heels, but he kept going. Finally he prevailed, sending shards of glass flying forward. The he used his shoe to dislodge the sharp edges lingering near the window frame.
He righted himself, leaned through the window, and checked the driver’s pulse. Weak and faltering. Nero was no doctor, but he didn’t like the driver’s chances.
He reached with both hands further down the driver’s body, searching for the pocket containing the manacle keys. He had to unbuckle the driver and manhandle his limp form, shifting the man’s weight to the left to access the pocket.
Nero shoved his hand inside. Pay dirt.
He pulled out the keys.
They dropped between the seats. Nero cursed, jammed both hands between the seats to retrieve them, and pulled the keys back through the shattered window.
He tried them on his handcuffs. Success. The same for his shackles, and then for Robert’s. They were no longer bound and chained.
“What do we do now?” Robert asked.
Nero looked at him. “Bro, we run,” he said.
Robert smiled. “I was hoping you were going to say that.”
There was no way to open the back door from within the prisoner van. The glass was bulletproof and wire-reinforced. Nero’s feet wouldn’t stand another onslaught. He motioned toward the small window.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 62
