by Jeff Abbott
Henry stared at him, as though anticipating the sight of a gun or a knife. ‘No. I tried to access the accounts; the passwords have been changed.’
All of Mouser’s pride, all his excitement over the mission well done, the blow against the Beast, turned to ash.
‘You can’t access the money?’ Snow asked, as though she didn’t understand.
‘Not for you. Not for anyone in the Night Road.’ Henry crossed his arms. ‘I rushed back here as soon as I could, so we can figure out what to do…’
‘No. No.’ Mouser lurched forward, to seize Henry. Henry raised a gun from under his own jacket. Mouser stopped.
‘Stop. We can’t fight amongst ourselves. What’s done is done. Listen to me. We’re going to fix this. We have to move forward with the first wave. And Hellfire stays on schedule.’
Mouser stopped himself. He wanted to strangle the life out of Henry Shawcross at that moment. Another betrayal, that’s all this was, just like every other moment in his life where he approached greatness, only to see his glory snatched away. He forced calmness into his breath. He felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder; he glanced behind him.
Snow said, ‘Was there any mention from the kidnapper about the first wave of attacks?’
‘No.’
‘Or of Hellfire?’ Her eyes were bright.
‘No. So the kidnapper is interested in the fifty million – not in stopping the attacks themselves,’ Henry said.
‘All right. They asked for a ransom of our money. What did you say?’ Mouser sat back down on the couch.
Henry returned his gun to his jacket. ‘I wasn’t willing to acknowledge that I had the money in case the conversation was being taped.’
‘So you refused to ransom your own kid. Your loyalty is an inspiration.’
‘I may have saved us all by doing so. Because I know who kidnapped Luke.’
‘Who?’
‘The banker who was in charge of setting up the financial accounts around the country for the fifty million is missing. Eric Lindoe. He hasn’t been at his job in the past three days.’
‘Who could have shut you out of the accounts?’
‘Only Eric. Only he and I had access. Mine is under a false name of course.’
‘You’re not making sense, Henry. If Eric Lindoe took the money, he has no reason to kidnap your stepson,’ Snow said in an even tone. She kept her grip on Mouser’s shoulder and he shrugged it off.
‘I think there is a simple explanation. If Eric was just a common embezzler, then he could simply steal the money and try to hide from us. There would be no reason to involve Luke. If the government – the Beast, as you so charmingly say, Mouser – has discovered us and turned Eric against us, again, there would be no need to kidnap my son. The FBI would freeze the funds, arrest Eric, and arrest me, try to force your names and those of everyone in the Night Road from me. And they would care about stopping the attacks, and then stopping Hellfire – they wouldn’t have the money as a focus. We face contradictory facts. Ergo, we must follow a third alternative: Eric wants everyone – us and our enemy – to think he doesn’t have the money, and our enemy is not the government.’
‘Ergo so who?’ Mouser asked, mocking.
‘Our enemy wants the fifty million for themselves. It might be someone in the Night Road, turning traitor against us, although no one in the group knows that Eric is our banker. Only I know him. So. I believe it’s an outsider, who has discovered the existence of the fifty million and knows we can hardly report the theft of it to the police.’
‘But why would Eric ask for a ransom that you couldn’t pay, if he knew you couldn’t access the accounts?’ Snow asked. A sharpness like a new-forged knife’s shone in her words. ‘What’s the point?’
‘The point of the ransom may have been to get me to agree to pay the money, get me on tape acknowledging that I knew about the money. Blackmail me. Maybe our enemy grabbed Eric, couldn’t get the money from him if he had changed the access codes to protect the money. He lied that he had no access to the money, and so the enemy panicked and grabbed Luke – or had Eric grab Luke – thinking I could still deliver the funds. And Eric let the enemy think he didn’t have the funds. But
… this is all theory.’
‘You mean we can’t even confirm if our money is still in the accounts?’ Mouser said in a cold whisper.
‘No. Not without knowing what the passwords are now. He took my name off and changed the access. I’m sure he’s hidden the funds. With that much money, Eric can hide forever, he can buy serious protection.’
‘How could he…?’
‘He’s an officer at the bank. He could manipulate the system to hide the money in a hundred places. I have one of our hackers trying to break into the bank’s database, so we can see if and where the money was transferred, but he’s had zero success.’
Mouser began to pace, a cold fury moving his legs. ‘Without the money, Hellfire doesn’t happen. Everything we’ve worked for doesn’t happen. Every risk we’ve taken… wasted.’
‘I want to aim you at the problem. Under one condition,’ Henry said.
‘What?’
‘No harm comes to my stepson.’
‘He can’t know about us, Henry. Not unless he joins us.’
‘I will deal with him. But you will not harm him. He could be very valuable to us.’
After a moment, Mouser nodded.
‘We need to find Eric and we need to find Luke.’
‘How?’
‘I’ve got a Night Road contact working on hacking the GPS system on Luke’s car, see where it is, see where it’s been. Then I want you to go find Luke and stash him somewhere so I can talk to him. Failing that – or if they’ve killed him – find his kidnappers. I will work on locating Eric.’
Snow said, ‘You turned down their ransom demand. They’ll have killed him.’
‘They won’t give up on fifty million just because I said no the first time. They might conclude I was worried about being taped or trapped. They’ll let me squirm, then send Luke’s finger to me, or an ear’ – Henry stopped a moment to steady his voice – ‘to prove the channels of negotiation are still open.’
‘All right.’
‘I am going to return to Washington. I’ll let you know what the hacker finds on Luke’s car. You are not to harm Luke and, if you find his kidnapper, keep him alive for questioning. Do you understand me?’
‘I’m taking an extra risk here,’ Mouser said.
‘And you’ll be rewarded with a greater share of money for your cause and glory.’
‘I need backup.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Snow said.
Mouser made a noise in his throat, lowered his voice. ‘No offense, but you’re a tech-head, a bomb maker.’
‘I’m a soldier, same as you,’ Snow said. ‘I know how to fight and fight hard. And no one is going to derail Hellfire. No one. Not after all the work I’ve done. I risked my life, every day, for weeks to build the bombs.’
‘I would rather you stay here,’ Mouser said. ‘You’ve got more work to do for Hellfire.’
‘Let me help you. We can make quick work of finding these people together.’
Henry said. ‘I agree with Snow. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.’
‘You sure got here quick,’ Mouser said. ‘Maybe you took the money, fed us this story, and you’re walking off with it.’ He put his hand back on his gun.
‘I wouldn’t have built the Night Road if I was going to betray it,’ Henry said. ‘I have to be back in Washington immediately, I can hitch a ride back on… a friend’s plane.’ He shook Mouser’s hand, Snow’s hand. ‘We’re off to a brilliant start today. We’ll get the money back, we’ll make Hellfire happen.’ He stood, leveled a look at them both. ‘Take care of Luke. No harm to him. I have your word.’
Henry left.
‘He must be scared to death. He could have told us this over the phone.’
‘Better to tell us face to fac
e,’ Snow said. ‘Especially since he’s asking you to save his kid.’
Mouser considered. ‘You have a point. Disappointment is always easier in person.’
‘You want something to eat? I’m hungry. Gonna make me a sandwich,’ Snow said.
Mouser shook his head. She went into the kitchen. He sat on the edge of the couch and thought how he’d sunk from the joy of the bombing to the anger of the missing money. Rescue a snot-nosed grad student who had been taught in the Beast’s tax-funded universities, where his mind had been poisoned to think the Beast’s system was good and noble. Did Henry honestly think he’d let the kid live? If the kidnappers knew about the Night Road, then they were all at risk and Luke Dantry was just an unfortunate witness. A risk.
He walked back into the living room. Snow had opened him a beer, left it for him on the coffee table. She was watching the coverage from Ripley. ‘I might have put too much oomph in the baby. Ruptured two tanks for sure, they say now, but a lot of the chlorine must’ve burned off. It’s given them time to evacuate more people.’
‘Ripley’s served its purpose, drawn the Beast’s stare right where we want it to be.’
She glanced at him. ‘Poetic.’
Mouser made a face at the idea of being poetic, and she laughed. Quietly. He ignored it. ‘I need to crash here.’
‘Guest room’s down the hall.’ She put her eyes back to the television screen.
‘You sure you can help me if we run into trouble?’
‘I can be whatever life needs me to be,’ Snow said, watching the dying town on the television, not looking at him. ‘You’re gonna kill his kid.’
Mouser didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.
Henry Shawcross did not take a commercial flight back to Washington, as he had the day before. Rather, he returned to Washington the same way he’d flown down this morning: he went to the airport and boarded a Travport freight cargo jet by flashing an ID and driver’s license that confirmed him as a Travport consultant, entitled to fly at a moment’s notice on any of the carrier’s flights, domestic or international.
He sat in one of the few passenger seats, watched the plane fly over east Texas. He would be home in a few hours.
What’s wrong with you, Luke had screamed, give them what they want. His stepson’s pleas tore at his chest but he had to keep his heart of stone. I will get you back, he thought. I will get you back and I will make you understand, Luke.
He used the plane’s internet connection to watch the news coverage of the chlorine disaster in Ripley. The most visible attack so far in the first wave. The bomb had burned up more of the gas than it should have, but it had gotten the world’s attention. Security was being raised at chemical plants and railway stations and airports, analysts pontificated on news stations as to whether it was an al-Qaeda attack or another jihadist group or a domestic terrorist or an accident. Every chemical facility in the country would be on heightened alert. Too many cities, too many water treatment plants had massive stores of lethal chlorine and Henry had thought long that it was a terrible weakness of American infrastructure. He had written a paper about such a threat a month ago; he checked his email. Now his paper held an urgency it had not a month before. He’d been proven smart and in tune with terrorist thinking. He was being flooded with requests from new and old clients on how to deal with the threat, and what the next threat might be. He smiled, fleetingly, for the first time since Luke’s ransom call.
It was all a delicious prelude to Hellfire.
Very different from the first time he’d written a paper about the possibility of a major terrorist attack, and been ignored and jeered. He had been right then; he was making sure he was right now.
Now he had struck, made his point, and all the government’s resources would go to stop a repeat occurrence.
Which was perfect.
Henry arrived in DC, picked up his car, drove for an extra hour to be sure he wasn’t being followed, and went home.
He waited for another ransom call. He was prepared to talk this time; he knew what he would say that could shield him if the call was taped. He kept calling Eric Lindoe; no answer. He did not want to call the prince he’d met in the London park three days before and explain that the fifty million was missing. It would be an immediate death sentence. Unless he ran. But if he ran, Luke was dead.
He got up, paced his floors. He listened to Bach, to Mahler, to settle his mind, to try and determine what he could do.
He tried to distract his mind by going back through Luke’s Night Road database, reading the postings Luke had made while play-acting at extremism, marveling at the discussions he’d had with the lost. Brilliant work the young man had done. Complete, insightful, using everything he’d learned about the emotional needs of extremists to connect with them, even through the looking glass of the internet. He had been nearly a perfect spy for Henry.
Henry had wept twice in his adult life: first when his wife, Luke’s mother, died in a car accident that never should have been. Now he wiped a tear from his eyes when he thought about Luke.
Stupid weakness, he told himself. You didn’t even like him at first. Or his mother. You’re weak. You cannot care, you cannot.
But he did. Didn’t the prince have a family? Didn’t Mouser? Why should he be alone? It was unfair, just as so much of his life had been. A constant, unyielding thorn of unfairness.
On the ongoing television coverage, he watched the bodies laying forlorn in the streets of Ripley, film taken from helicopters, and he felt nothing. He saw a minivan crashed near the train depot, a boy’s body a few feet from the wreck, and he thought of Luke.
He slept fitfully at his desk, the phone by his head. He forgot to eat.
When the phone rang, nearly a full day after the first ransom demand, he grabbed it so hard that he nearly flung it across the room. He forced himself to gain control before he spoke. ‘Yes?’
It was the hacker that he had asked to break into the GPS database. ‘Your son’s BMW has been parked near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for the past day.’
‘Where was it before? From when it was at the Austin airport?’
‘The GPS tracker followed it to Houston. It stopped at two addresses. I can give them to you…’
Henry scribbled down the addresses. He called up the addresses on his computer while the hacker continued to talk.
‘Then it departed to an area outside a small town in east Texas called Braintree. The coordinates match that of a rental cabin. Stayed parked there for nearly twenty minutes, then proceeded to the DFW airport, arriving at 6.07 a.m.’
A nowhere town called Braintree. Why would a kidnapper after fifty million go to some rental cabin deep in the piney woods?
Stashing Luke, perhaps. Or killing him and burying him among the pines. The thought made Henry’s throat go dry.
The addresses in Houston were for a parking lot and then a bank.
He thanked the hacker. The doorbell rang again ten minutes later, as he hung up from talking to Mouser and giving him the information on the Braintree cabin.
Henry opened the door – to find a reporter and a television camera standing on his porch. The young woman shoved the microphone into his face and Henry froze.
‘Mr Shawcross, we need a comment from you…’
9
Everyone was dead. Luke knew it as soon as he opened his eyes. He stood in the back of the private jet and began to walk through the small cabin. The whine of the engines, racing to nowhere, was the only sound. His father’s friends lay slumped in their seats, faces blue, jaws slack. One had his fingers tucked into his collar, as though the fabric had strangled him with a noose-like tightness. Luke wasn’t breathing, either. He could see frost coating the inside of the jet’s windows. He tried to wipe it away with his fingertips. If he knelt he could see out the glass, an endless smear of the Atlantic below, no land in sight.
The medal his father gave him, the avenging angel, burned with cold fury against his chest.
‘For every reason,’ Ace Beere said. He tapped his temple, marred by a bullet wound.
Luke pushed past him. His father and the pilots would be in the cockpit, they would be okay, not dead like everyone out here…
He opened the door. ‘Dad?’ he called.
The cockpit was empty, gone, the ocean rushing at him like a wall.
Luke jerked awake. He thought for a moment he was on that ghost plane, flying with its suffocated corpses over the ocean until its fuel was gone. But it was just a dream. He was in a far worse situation as he moved his arms and heard the clink of the chains and remembered he was bound to the cabin bed.
Trapped in a death, just like his father had been, far from everyone he loved, beyond rescue. Except his father had no chance. Luke was going to have to make his own luck.
Betrayed. That son-of-a-bitch Henry betrayed me. The thought cut like a knife in Luke’s mind.
For most of the morning Luke had slept. Exhaustion, driven by the long dance with adrenaline, put a stronger claim on him than fear. He awoke in the late afternoon, bleary from his nightmare, twenty-six hours after Eric kidnapped him, his stomach knotting in hunger and thunder blaring outside the windows. He felt a childish urge to cry – a clutching in his jaw and his chest – and he kept it at arm’s distance until it passed. He tested the chains again, as though their strength had weakened while he slept, and then he dozed some more. When he awoke the rain dropped to a steady hiss, a white noise that allowed him to think.
The chain cuffs were blister-tight against his wrists and ankles. He found enough give in the chains to allow him to sit up on the mattress and stand up next to the bed.
He examined the room. The metal bed was pushed close to the wall and bolted to the wooden floor. The shackles were attached to the iron bed, not the wall. Under the bed sat a small plastic container. He opened it; it was a chemical toilet. It needed emptying but he felt a sudden relief that he wouldn’t have to soil himself or his bed. Crumpled peanut butter cracker wrappers and an empty water bottle were also under the bed. Under the heavily draped window, a table stood. On it was a small lamp, casting an anemic glow on the hardwood floor. A plain wooden chair. Another door was in a corner, maybe leading to a closet. He couldn’t get close to it.
