Fear

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘That’s Doctor Hurley’s car parked there. His plates. I checked. He normally spends the night with his patients?’

  ‘No, but last night was a special case.’

  ‘I get the feeling Hurley’s avoiding me. Is he here or not?’

  Groote weighed the options, life or death.

  ‘I really have to insist, Mr. Groote. At the least Doctor Hurley can step outside and talk to me for five minutes.’

  Groote decided, with regret. He slammed the car door closed and tried to seem embarrassed under his bandage. ‘Hurley talked to your person of interest; Hurley was the one at the hospital who called him. He’s been calling all of Allison Vance’s patients. A mild form of ambulance chasing.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Groote jerked his head toward the house. ‘Why don’t you come on in and we’ll talk?’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Miles awoke to screams.

  He lurched out of bed, unsure if he had actually slept. He had no morning aftertaste of nightmares: no Andy dying crumpled on concrete, no cries of horror echoing in the dreamy cave of his brain, no office of Allison’s blasting into flaming rubble. The screams were from another’s throat, thrashing cries of terror.

  He ran up the stairs. Nathan lay in a tangle of bedsheets, fists clenched against air, kicking in a rage of shock.

  ‘Nathan. Wake up. Wake-’ and Nathan’s fist closed around his throat, fingers of iron digging into Miles’s windpipe.

  ‘I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t break it!’ Nathan screamed. His voice crumbled into a ragged moan. ‘I fixed it I fixed it I swear!’

  ‘Nathan!’

  Nathan jumped up from the bed, drove Miles hard into the wall, staring into his face.

  ‘It’s Miles. Let go,’ he managed to say, sucking in the scarce oxygen.

  ‘Nathan, stop it,’ Celeste ordered from the doorway.

  Nathan released Miles, stumbled back wordlessly, and sat on the bed.

  ‘Bad dream,’ Miles said. ‘Just a dream, man, you’re okay.’

  An anger close to hate gleamed in Nathan’s dark eyes. ‘I don’t dream.’

  ‘Dream and scream. I been there.’

  Nathan went into the bathroom – the mirror shrouded with a towel – and splashed water onto his face. Miles saw Nathan’s hands were shaking.

  ‘I don’t dream,’ Nathan said again.

  ‘Whatever.’ Miles rubbed the finger marks out of his throat.

  ‘Screw you. I served my country, I was a soldier. What were you? A mobster, Miles, so don’t talk down to me.’

  Miles said, ‘I won’t, as long as you don’t try to strangle me more than once a day.’

  Nathan started rummaging in the guest closet for spare clothes. ‘Miles. Listen, thanks for getting my ass out of the hospital. Appreciate it. But you and me, we’re settled, I told you everything I know. Time to part ways.’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Don’t know yet.’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Help.’

  ‘We believe Allison sent the Frost research to a Web hosting company called Mercury Mountain. Probably to hide it from Sorenson, or to give it to someone else who could access the Web server. We need to find out where this server is.’

  Nathan stopped at the door.

  ‘Groote and Sorenson will want you dead. They’ll want us all dead. Our only chance is to get Frost, prove what they’ve done to the world.’

  ‘You do expose them, you ruin any chance for you or Celeste or me, or anyone else with PTSD, to use Frost to get better. You think any drug company’s going to produce a drug that the world knows was based on illegal experiments? Hell, no. You expose Frost, then you cut our own throats, man, we’ll be broken forever.’ His fists clenched. ‘I agreed to the VR testing because I wanted to help my fellow soldiers. That matters more to me than some sad, pointless revenge.’

  ‘We get Frost, we can help every soldier coming back from the war. Every child that’s traumatized by abuse. Everyone who needs Frost,’ Miles said. ‘A legit company could do the research ethically, build on what Hurley did. There’s nothing unethical about the chemical formula of Frost.’

  Nathan nodded his head.

  ‘But Groote and Quantrill and Sorenson, they’ll be hunting us, Nathan, they will kill us if they find us. We can’t recover if we’re dead. And Allison asked you, and me, and Celeste, in different ways, to help her. I’m not inclined to let the people who killed her get away with murder.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? You’re a mobster, the feds are hunting you, not just Groote. And she doesn’t want to step outside.’ Nathan gave a jagged laugh. ‘I can do plenty to get it back, but I can’t have the two of you tripping me up. I suggest you guys lay very low for the next few days.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘You want to be a hero. Then be one,’ Miles said quietly. ‘We shouldn’t work apart. Work with us.’

  Nathan took five steps, then stopped. He rested his head against the doorjamb. ‘I’m not good with people. You don’t really want me around.’

  ‘You can’t have a life on the run alone, Nathan. No money, no prospects, no help. We don’t even know what the long-term effects of Frost might be. You can’t run off on your own. Help us. You knew more about what Allison was planning. I know you must have trusted her. Cared about her.’

  Nathan weighed the words for several moments. He dropped his bag on the floor, raised his head, nodded. ‘All right. I’m in. So what’s the next step?’

  ‘Find Frost,’ Miles said, ‘and take the fight right back to these bastards.’

  Breakfast was stale bagels, made edible through toasting and a thin coating of jam, and a pot of industrial-strength coffee. Normal morning routine. Except their routines usually included antidepressants, precious pills that they didn’t have, and Miles wondered if the three of them would lose focus, the power of clear thinking, without their meds.

  ‘So you just look up this Mercury Mountain on a computer and call them?’ Nathan asked around a mouthful of bagel.

  ‘I don’t think we call. We go see whoever has access to the IP address where Allison sent the research.’ He glanced at the clock: 6:00 A.M. He needed a computer on which he could make an online purchase and install new software, and he figured he wouldn’t be able to do that on a coffee-shop computer.

  But he could on the gallery’s computers, if the locks hadn’t been changed. Joy was in early often, but six in the morning was too early for her. He wondered if there would still be the police protection at the gallery he’d asked DeShawn to provide.

  ‘We’ll all go,’ Celeste said.

  ‘You don’t have to, you can stay inside.’

  ‘No. Let’s all go,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll be okay.’

  They found a pair of ill-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt for Nathan, along with tennis shoes. Celeste put on dark glasses and a ball cap and a windbreaker. She took the windbreaker’s hood and pulled it over her head; too big for her, it shielded her face.

  ‘You gonna be okay?’ Miles asked her at the door.

  ‘Yes. Let’s do it.’

  The three of them drove to the gallery, Miles driving, more confident behind the wheel. The lot was empty; no police car. Miles hurried them to the gallery’s door, noticing a plywood cover where a pane of glass had been. He tried his key, fed his code into the alarm system. The red light changed to green.

  Celeste slid the windbreaker’s hood from her head, stepped inside, shivering. She and Nathan examined the art on the walls.

  ‘What lovely pieces,’ she said.

  ‘Touch nothing,’ he said, giving Nathan a hard look. Nathan shrugged. They followed him upstairs to Joy’s office.

  Miles fired the computer up, opened a browser, hunted in Google for the name Mercury Mountain. No Web site for a hosting service – so not a hosting service that wanted customers, just a name to attach to a server. Miles jumped to a software vendor who sold IP address tracking software,
dug out the VISA card he’d opened in his father’s name for emergencies.

  ‘I used this software when I had to track for the mob who really owned certain porn sites,’ Miles said. ‘It’s gotten a lot harder to find out who has certain Web domains, they could be bought with a stolen credit card or paid for ten years with a money order. But I’d find which of my bosses’ rivals owned porn sites, and my boss hired hackers to bring down the sites, cut into the rivals’ profits.’

  ‘You knew all the charming people,’ Celeste said.

  Miles bought the software, entered in his VISA number, prayed the transaction would go through. Waiting. And then he got a confirmation.

  ‘Thank God,’ he said. He downloaded and installed the software, entered his license key, and entered in the IP address Celeste had found on her system. A map of the United States displayed, tracking the IP address, and finally pulsed on a location in northern California. Miles clicked: the IP address belonged to a server in Fish Camp, California, owned by an Edward Wallace.

  ‘Google him,’ Celeste said. Miles did, conscious now that they might only have minutes left. Joy – at DeShawn’s request – could have put an alert on the alarm system to let him know if the gallery was accessed after hours, just in case Miles came back. He hoped not.

  Most of the Google results offered links to articles written by Edward Wallace – a few years out of date – mostly on post-traumatic stress disorder, and the gist seemed to be that the government was moving too slowly in addressing the growing problem of traumatic stress, especially among soldiers. He clicked through them; Edward Wallace was a neurobiology researcher in PTSD, affiliated with a university in San Diego. At least he had been four years ago.

  ‘She sent it to Edward Wallace for analysis, maybe,’ Celeste said.

  Miles clicked on the next-to-last link. It summoned a local news story in a small-town paper from Fish Camp, California. An Edward Wallace of Fish Camp had been injured in a hiking accident. He was new to town – recently relocated from Fresno. His wife, Renee, was on an extended teaching fellowship in psychiatry at a medical school in the United Kingdom, so he had been hiking alone when he fell.

  ‘Odd. They don’t mention the name of the school,’ Celeste said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Where exactly in California is Fish Camp?’

  Miles clicked and searched and found a map. ‘Just a couple of miles south of Yosemite National Park.’

  ‘We should call him. Say we know Allison and need to know how he’s involved,’ Nathan said.

  Miles clicked on the last link, an archived notice from The Fresno Bee.

  There was a wedding picture of Edward – bookish and tall – and his bride, Renee, smiling, intelligent, confident, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Renee Wallace was Allison Vance.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Groote cleaned off the screwdriver under a jet of water.

  At his feet, on the kitchen floor, lay DeShawn Pitts. Groote believed a man bent, broken, and without hope was a tragic sight.

  Groote ran a finger along the edge of the screwdriver. He’d learned the technique in Laos from a morals-challenged detective when Groote briefly worked with their police force on an exchange program: make a slight cut where the skin lay shallow over the bone, drive the screwdriver’s tip to the bone, twist and shred the flesh, let the subject hear the sound of metal grating against their own skeleton. Keep the subject gagged and you had quiet and a minimum of mess.

  ‘One last time,’ Groote said. ‘Or we’ll let Mr. Screwdriver explore fresh new territories. Above the eye socket. The pubic bone. Base of the spine.’ He lowered himself down to DeShawn’s eye level. ‘Listen. Why protect this guy? He screwed you over. He ran. Didn’t give a thought to your career, your professional standing.’

  ‘My job,’ DeShawn managed to say – his voice was barely above a whisper – ‘… to protect him.’

  ‘I’m not with the piece-of-crap drug dealer you’re hiding him from,’ Groote said. ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass what he did before. I’m a now kind of guy. I need to know how to best bring him to the surface.’

  DeShawn closed his eyes.

  ‘Where’s he from originally?’ He started to undo DeShawn’s pants.

  ‘No, please. No.’

  ‘Tell me. This isn’t pleasant for me either.’

  ‘You’ll kill me.’

  ‘I have no quarrel with you. My quarrel’s with Michael Raymond, who ran away from you.’

  DeShawn closed his eyes. ‘Never.’

  ‘ Never is such an outdated concept,’ Groote said, reaching for the knife, imagining a blue surgeon’s line in his craftsman’s eye on the tender skin.

  It took twenty more minutes, and his answers came in a broken flood as he played the knife’s edge against an open nerve: ‘Miles Kendrick – Miami.’

  He knew the name. Jesus. He’d heard the guy’s name before, talking with a couple of other old FBI hounds, talking about the Barradas’ clever spy. He’d never seen a picture but he’d heard the name. No telling how many crime rings that guy put a fucking dent in, man, the Barradas’ own CIA, who ever knew mobsters would get creative and get themselves a spy?

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Pitts,’ Groote said. ‘Mr. Kendrick hurt a lot of criminal organizations. Do you know if he ever struck at the Duartes in southern California?’

  DeShawn nodded. ‘He… helped take… them down…’

  Yeah, but not down enough. They’d still had the strength to come after his family, blame the Grootes for their misfortunes. ‘How did he take the Duartes down?’

  ‘Think he… stole spreadsheets…’

  ‘When?’ And God help Miles Kendrick, Groote thought, if it was before the attack on his family.

  DeShawn didn’t answer, sliding toward unconsciousness. Groote controlled his sudden rage. Focus on what mattered now. ‘What do you know about Frost?’

  ‘What?’ There was no deception left in DeShawn’s eyes.

  ‘Where would Miles go? Back to Miami?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How hard is Witness Protection and the Bureau searching for him?’

  DeShawn passed out and Groote slapped him awake, repeated the question.

  ‘Hard,’ DeShawn managed.

  ‘Now. You’ve been very helpful. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I need to consider my options.’ Deciding about how Pitts made the best bait, alive on the hook or limp in death. No reason for Miles Kendrick to care about this dumb-ass. Groote stood, checked his gun, tucked a plastic trash bag under DeShawn’s head, fired once between the half-open eyes; the head jerked as the bullet funneled through bone and brain.

  Groote tried to step into Allison’s head. She planned to run with Frost’s secrets, expose Quantrill and Hurley’s illegal testing. She was going to vanish from her life, and who better to help her than a man who’d already vanished from his own? A man who stole secrets, as she’d stolen Frost. Except the plan went wrong for Allison. You couldn’t tempt a criminal, a mobster, with a drug formula worth millions. Meat before the wolf, and he’d killed Allison for Frost. Groote was sure of it now. He’d thought first it might have been Sorenson, but he believed Sorenson was just a hired muscle for a pharmaceutical, making an attempt to steal the drug. Maybe Nathan, in league with Allison, knew about the deal and Sorenson wanted his tracks cleaned.

  The evidence suggested Miles Kendrick had Frost. He was keeping it for his own gain, and he was keeping it from Amanda, and all the other people it could save.

  He turned off the water, flicked the last drop free from the flat edge. Now he knew his enemy’s face, his name, and he believed he knew how to defeat him. There was a calmness in the knowledge. He’d thought killing the Duarte accountant was the final step in justice for Cathy and Amanda; but no. Fate and its engine of revenge had brought him full circle, brought him to a man who could mean justice for his lost Cathy and sanctuary for his lost Amanda.

  So Miles Kendrick needed Nathan Ruiz as an example of the drug’s po
wer, to bolster the case made in the research files. See Nathan, on video, barely able to speak when he starts taking Frost; see him, after months of it, able to effect an escape from a mental hospital and take part in a conspiracy. See, folks, this stuff works and works good, step right up, buy a bottle.

  Miles Kendrick was running, crazy, with two other loonies weighing him down, and Groote was going to find him. And get Frost back.

  The second auction for Frost – if Sorenson spoke truth, and he would have to confront Quantrill with this information – would be in three days. Kendrick had to be setting it up already, pressed to profit from all of Hurley and Quantrill’s hard work. So he had three days to find Kendrick.

  The answer was in Celeste Brent’s computer. It had brought Allison here, it had brought Miles here. So start there. And find them, and kill them.

  His watch said seven in the morning. He had time before sunset to take the bodies out to the high desert and dispose of them.

  His phone buzzed. He answered.

  Quantrill. Sounding tense, sounding bitter. ‘I’m on my way to Santa Fe. We seriously need to talk.’

  ‘That,’ said Groote, ‘is the understatement of the year.’

  ‘This is a goddamned disaster-’ Quantrill started.

  ‘Not on the phone. Just tell me where you want to meet.’

  Quantrill did, anger still in his tone. Groote clicked off and the phone buzzed immediately.

  It was his hacker friend who had found the Michael Raymond address off the cell-phone account. ‘I kept at that Michael Raymond problem for you. Nabbed a peek into the caller records. Finally wormed my way in.’

  ‘Do tell. I’d like to know who he’s been calling.’

  ‘He made only one call on his cell phone yesterday. To a cell phone owned by a guy named Grady Blaine, there in Santa Fe. You want Blaine’s address?’

  ‘I most certainly do,’ Groote said.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘It can’t be her,’ Celeste said. ‘It can’t be.’

  Miles traced his finger over the photo. A woman, smiling shyly into the camera’s lens, a casual photo taken during a run or hike outside. She wore an athletic top and shorts, stood atop a mountain, full of vitality. The kind of informal engagement photo favored by active couples. The photo credit printed sideways next to the picture read ‘Edward Wallace.’ It listed their degrees – Edward a Ph. D. in neurobiology and Renee an M.D. in psychiatry. She’d previously worked at both a university and a military clinic in San Diego to help veterans recover from posttraumatic stress disorder. She and her husband had moved to Fresno to establish a similar clinic.