Black Skies

by Leo J. Maloney

  “They end up unemployed or at dead-end jobs.”

  “Or they end up owning their own companies and becoming millionaires,” said Morgan. “Let her find her thing. A girl like that? Not having a college degree isn’t going to hold her back from anything she wants to do. And if she ends up wanting to become a doctor or something, she can always go back.”

  Jenny looked miffed. “I don’t want you encouraging this sort of thing. It won’t end well, I know it.”

  “Let her learn that her actions have consequences, then,” said Morgan. “That’s a more important lesson than anything she’ll learn in college.”

  “She’s not you, Dan. I think sometimes you forget how young she is. And how sensitive, deep down. I’m glad you two are bonding and having fun together, I really am. But couldn’t you go fishing or something, for once?”

  “She’s old enough to make her own decisions, Jen.”

  “Is she? She’s eighteen. I’m not saying she’s not mature. But you don’t have to encourage this kind of thing.”

  “Why not, if that’s what makes her happy?” asked Morgan. “I always did, and look where it got me.”

  She cast him a sharp sidelong glance. “That’s exactly it, Dan. It’s hard enough having one of you in my life. All I need right now is another member of this family to worry myself sick over. But let’s not talk about it, okay? I just want to be near you.”

  Morgan fell asleep with his wife in his arms. For that moment, at least, everything was right in the world. In the morning, he would rejoin the fray.

  Chapter 11

  May 28

  Andover

  Alex Morgan had set her alarm for 3:30 in the morning. Her eyes opened when it rang, and she deactivated before it had rung twice. Getting out of bed, she pulled on the sweatpants and T-shirt she had laid out the night before. She didn’t know when her father would leave, so she lay in her bed, listening for signs of stirring in the house. She took the opportunity to browse the news on her phone. Every outlet was blowing up with stories about the abduction of the Secretary of State. Alex hadn’t known much about the man before, but there was no lack of information now.

  Secretary of State Lee Erwin Wolfe had been a hero of the Gulf War, collecting medals and, more important, the respect of his men and of his superiors. He’d been conducting his duties as Secretary of State with his characteristic boldness and self-assuredness. His tenure had so far been effective in garnering cooperation from many countries to hunt terrorists and other enemies of the United States. He was friendly when possible, tough when necessary. He was one of those rare figures who was admired on both sides of the aisle.

  Alex remained under the covers reading the news until her father got up at five. She heard the sounds of the shower first, then of him going downstairs. After a few minutes she heard the rumble of his car’s engine pulling out of the driveway and moving down the street.

  She didn’t hurry—she didn’t need to. She knew her father was going to take I-93 down to Boston, so she might as well catch up with him there. Plus, she didn’t want him to spot her tailing him through the narrow suburban streets that led to the highway. She waited for two minutes to elapse—she had been training herself to count time in her head, and was within twenty seconds when she checked her phone—and then walked downstairs, treading lightly so as to avoid waking up her mother.

  She made her way to the garage and got on her Ducati Streetfighter. It was a graphite sports cycle, sleek and aerodynamic, and it felt bulky and powerful between her legs, like a thoroughbred horse she had once ridden on a trip she’d taken with a friend. Her father had given her a pink helmet to wear, which Alex suspected he did precisely so that he could spot her if she ever tried to do what she was planning at that very moment, but Alex had secretly bought a second helmet, all black, for the exact opposite purpose.

  She took the black helmet out of its hiding spot in a box of her old stuffed animals. She then unhooked the chain from the garage door motor and pulled it open, revealing the gray light of dawn outside and letting in a gust of chill air that broke against her leather jacket. She guided the bike out, closed the garage door, and walked it about one hundred yards from the house. Satisfied that doing so would avoid waking her mother, she hopped on and turned the ignition.

  The bike rumbled underneath her. She set out, slowly at first until she was far enough from the house, and then she unleashed.

  Alex Morgan’s experiences had taught her to use the phrase life-changing carefully, but getting the motorcycle nearly justified it. She loved her newfound mobility, the speed and flexibility of the vehicle. Sometimes she’d take the motorcycle out on the highway at night to see how fast she could go. She was working up to asking her father for stunt-riding lessons (asking her mother would have been a waste of breath), but in the meantime she had to be content with looking up videos and instructions on the Internet and trying them out in empty lots and deserted country roads.

  Alex cut corners and pushed the throttle as far as she could while making the curves until she reached the highway. There, she matched her speed to the fast lane, keeping an eye out for her father. She spotted his Mustang by its stripes and slowed down to keep a safe distance from him. Lately, he’d been teaching her how to tail a car without getting seen, and she applied the principles he had taught her

  He had, of course, warned her against doing this very thing, but curiosity had gotten the best of her. She wondered about where he worked, what exactly he did. She fantasized about going on missions both with him and alone. Also—and she had taken after him in this way—she wasn’t the sort to take that kind of warning to heart.

  When her father, in the Shelby, signaled and took the off-ramp to downtown Boston, she followed suit, making careful mental notes of each of the turns he took. Eventually, she turned a corner and saw his car disappear into a building’s garage. She found a parking spot on the street and dismounted in time to see the garage door begin to descend.

  Leaving her helmet with the motorcycle, she ran to the door and crouched, squeezing under it into the garage. There was an additional gate for cars that didn’t keep pedestrians out. She sneaked farther in, running along the wall and down a ramp. She followed the faint growl of her father’s muscle car reverberating through the garage, then the tut tut tut of idling, and then the noise cut off. He had parked.

  Alex continued downward. Halfway down the ramp to the third floor underground, the wall ended in an opening to her right. She stood flat against a corner and peered out into a seemingly forgotten parking sconce that fit maybe twenty-five cars. She saw her father shutting the door to the Shelby. He walked to a nondescript door in the corner and disappeared into it.

  Bingo.

  Alex ran back up to street level. She found a button to open the garage door and walked out into the brisk early morning air. Very satisfied, she got back on her motorcycle and rode away, the roar of the motor echoing between the sheer faces of tall buildings. She had found the place. For the time being, that would be enough.

  Chapter 12

  May 28

  Islamabad

  “This is it,” said Harun. He turned the Daihatsu into the parking lot of a low-cost apartment block, not a mile away from one of the city slums. It was a dark night. Working streetlights were few and far between, and there was no one to be seen out on the street.

  “Are you sure?” asked Conley.

  “That’s the address for Parvez Nutkani.” Harun had made some phone calls to the city hospitals. It took him three hours, but he got the names of the driver and the emergency responder who had been in the ambulance that carried away the injured attacker. An additional call had gotten their addresses.

  “He is in building number four,” Harun added. It took them a few minutes to determine which building was which. It was dark, and the numbers that weren’t missing were hardly visibly placed. Luckily, there was no security to speak of, and they had the run of the place. Still, the whole operation was sloppy
and rushed. They might have waited to get together a tactical team and run a well-organized op, but in a race against time, Conley knew you had to work with what you had. And what they had was just the two of them in a Daihatsu beater.

  Harun found a spot and parked, and they skulked along the shadows to the outer gate to the apartment building. Conley slipped his lock-pick tools from the pocket of his khakis. He inserted the lock pick and the torsion wrench. His fingers moved deftly as he nudged the pins into place, getting the lock open in just under twenty seconds.

  He opened the gate and stepped aside to let Harun in. He put in a piece of duct tape to keep the gate from locking behind them and pulled it shut. They walked up the stairs as fast as they could without being audible to any of the residents. They stopped at the landing of the fourth floor and crept to the door of their quarry’s apartment.

  “You’re sure he lives alone, right?” whispered Conley, pulling out his tools once more and inserting the torsion wrench into the lock, working as quietly as he could.

  “That is what his file said,” Harun responded, shrugging.

  The lock gave, and Conley very slowly turned the knob. He pushed it open, and then met with a sudden resistance. There was a security chain on the door. Conley took two short paces back, drew his gun, and kicked the door in. He took the lead and ran inside, with Harun close behind him.

  It was a small apartment, dark except for the dim yellow light coming in from the streetlights outside. They were in a combination kitchen and dining room. There were two doors, and one led to a bathroom. Conley ran ahead to the other, to the bedroom, which he opened and found Parvez Nutkani, young, wiry, with longish hair on his head and no hair on his face, wearing tan cotton pajamas that were moist with sweat. The man woke up with a start, eyes wide, looking around like a terrified animal. Harun talked to him in Urdu.

  “Stay. Do not move. We will not hurt you if you cooperate.”

  Conley clicked on the light. The room was cramped, with a narrow single bed in its center. There, Nutkani lay cowering, wide-eyed. Harun had his gun pointed straight at the man’s face a few inches away.

  “Will you keep still?” Harun asked.

  “I will,” Nutkani responded weakly, in Urdu.

  “Good,” said Harun, lowering his gun, but making sure to keep it in Nutkani’s line of sight. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

  This seemed to make Nutkani even more nervous, but he didn’t move. His wide eyes remained fixed on the gun. “What—what do you want to ask me about?”

  “You were in the ambulance that took a man from the airport today after the attack,” said Harun. “Is that correct? Yes or no is enough.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Was the man one of the ones who took the American Secretary of State?” asked Harun.

  “Yes,” Nutkani stammered.

  “How did he die?”

  The man’s face seemed to sink. He must have expected the question, but there was obviously something there. He was terrified, and but he wasn’t looking at the gun anymore.

  “I, uh . . . he was wounded when we picked him up.” His voice was shaking. “He bled out in the ambulance. There was nothing we could do to save him.”

  “Do not lie to us,” Harun said. “If you lie to us again, we will kill you. Did the patient you were transporting die from the gunshot he took during the attack?”

  Tears welled up in Nutkani’s eyes. “Please. Please. Don’t make me talk.”

  “There is something to say, then?” asked Harun.

  “Please,” he said, crying, the pitch of his voice rising. “They will kill me. They will kill my parents. Please don’t make me talk.”

  “You won’t convince me to let you go,” said Harun. “The best chance you have now to survive is to tell us everything you know, and pray to Allah that we find the people who are threatening you before they come to kill you.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “My friend here?” said Harun, motioning with his head toward Conley. “The one who looks foreign? American. He’s CIA. Maybe I can give you to him, and we can see what you tell him. And then you spend the next twenty years in Guantanamo Bay, if you are lucky. Now, start talking. Did you kill the prisoner, Nutkani?”

  “I—I did not,” he said, still trying to hold back his tears. “I did not kill him myself.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Harun commanded him, his voice menacingly cold.

  “We were hailed by an official vehicle,” he said. “The driver pulled over and the back door was opened. I was ordered at gunpoint to get out of the ambulance and turn away. The driver, too. Afterward, they told us to get on our way and left. When I got back into the ambulance, the man was dead. Suffocated, I believe.”

  “Who did this?”

  “I do not know,” he said. “They were two men with handguns. They were dressed in suits. They looked like government types.”

  Conley shot Harun a glance, but the Pakistani did not look up from the man on the bed. “Can you describe them?”

  “I do not know. They looked normal. Clean-shaven. One had his hair slicked back.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” said Harun.

  “Please!” He cried, his hands linking in a supplicating gesture. “I do not know! It happened very quickly, and I could not see his face well! There is nothing more I can tell you!”

  Harun looked up at Conley, and Conley gestured toward the door

  “Do not tell anyone we were here,” said Harun. “We know where you live, and we will come back for you if you tell anyone.”

  Connor and Harun slinked out of the apartment and walked downstairs. Conley pulled the duct tape from the outer gate as they exited. They were halfway to the car when Conley spoke.

  “Now do you accept there are elements of your government involved?”

  “Bastards,” Harun said with pure hate. “Sons of a whore!”

  “We need to find whoever is behind this, or there could be war.”

  “I will find him and kill him,” Harun said. His pace picked up with the intensity in his voice.

  “Easy there,” said Conley. “Slow down. Whoever it is, we need to focus on finding the Secretary first. That’s our number-one priority. Things can still be salvaged if we find the Secretary alive. But if we don’t—”

  “We will find him,” said Harun. “We have a lead.”

  “Well, it’s not a lot to go on. All we have is two men—”

  “And a government car,” said Harun. “If we find the ambulance driver, perhaps he will give us enough information to track down—” He stopped short, his eyes focusing somewhere over to Conley’s right. “Quick, into the shadow!”

  Conley heard the car approaching before he saw it. It was coming in fast, tires squealing as it turned a corner in the apartment complex parking garage. They walked into the shadow of a nearby tree, which in the lack of electric light enveloped them in pitch-black. Conley strained to see the car. Its green license plate told him that it was a government vehicle. The car came to a screeching halt in front of Nutkani’s building. Two men emerged from the car carrying semiautomatic rifles. They stopped at the gate. It took them a minute to open it and disappear inside.

  Conley and Harun looked at each other, and knew what was happening. They ran after the men, retracing their previous steps, and through the gate, which had been left open. Conley stopped Harun before he started up the stairwell, and pointed to his shoes.

  “Take them off.”

  Conley hastily undid the knots on his bootlaces and pulled them off. They sprinted up the stairs, Conley taking the lead. The tiles were cold beneath his feet, and he almost lost his footing twice in his hurry. He could hear the footsteps of the men above, at least two floors above Conley and Harun.

  Without shoes, they were moving silently enough that they wouldn’t be heard. They pressed on, two steps at a time, Conley’s legs burning with the effort after two flights. The pattern of the footsteps abo
ve changed, and Conley knew they had reached the fourth-floor landing.

  There was a loud crash upstairs—that would be the door being kicked in, Conley thought. Seconds later, Conley and Harun reached Nutkani’s floor. Just as they made the landing, Conley heard four shots coming from a poorly suppressed handgun. Too late for poor Nutkani, he thought.

  Conley tapped Harun, who had obviously heard it, too, to get his attention. He motioned toward the door to the apartment, and then positioned himself on one side of it. Harun stood on the other side, a tactical knife in his right hand.

  They didn’t have to wait too long. The first man emerged from the door, looking straight ahead, in too much of a rush to notice the two standing flat against the wall. As soon as the second came out the door, Harun grabbed his head and slit his throat ear to ear. Lunging forward, Conley caught up with the first man and kicked in his left leg while reaching forward and grabbing for his gun. The man cried out and contorted in pain. Conley relieved him of his gun as the man tipped over and fell on the tiled floor.

  “Cougar,” said Harun. “There were gunshots. Someone will have heard. We need to get out of here. The police will come.”

  “Well then,” said Conley. “We’ll just take him with us.”

  Conley bent down to pick the man up by the armpits. The man’s hand went to his pocket. Conley saw the flash of metal: a switchblade, being thrust up at his torso. Conley dodged the knife, then took the man’s wrist in his hand and twisted his arm until the blade clattered on the floor. He continued to twist until he heard the man’s arm snap. He then picked up the blade from the floor and stabbed it deep into the man’s bicep. The man roared in pain.

  “Try something like that again,” said Conley, “and it goes in your eye.” The man looked at him with eyes of pure fury. “Ah, you speak English, then. That’ll make this whole process easier.”

  “Eat shit, you CIA pig!”

  “Not CIA. Good guess, though.” He punched the man in the face. Blood trickled from his nose. “Now, we’re getting out of here.” He looked at the man’s leg, which bulged visibly even through his pants on the spot where Conley had kicked him. “Your leg is broken, but this will still be a lot easier if you’re conscious. Your choice.”