by Jeff Abbott
As though these horrors had merely been the first act of what the Night Road might unleash on America and its allies. How high could they aim with fifty million dollars at their disposal? They could create a wave of 9/11s, an endless chain of attacks and horror, stretching over months, over years. And if the enemy was already inside the borders, working together across ideologies for their common goal – how much more dangerous could they be? Luke stuffed the file back into the cabinet. He was past feeling sickened; now he only felt a steady rage at how he had been used.
Files on Eric. Lots of notes about his bank, Marolt Gold, which seemed to specialize in nice wealthy Americans and a few people of dubious integrity. The notes suggested the bank had been under Quicksilver’s eye for the past several months due to its connection to a certain Arab billionaire, who was suspected of funding terrorism. A photo of Eric and Aubrey, taken in happier times, big sunglasses hiding most of Aubrey’s face but not her happy smile. Photos of the two of them walking through Versailles – he remembered that Aubrey had particularly wanted to go there, and that a variant of versailles had been used as a password on Eric’s laptop.
Good God, he thought. How long had Quicksilver been watching Eric?
A file on Luke. The words DO NOT CONTACT were stamped in red on a photo of himself, a fairly recent one, leaving Henry’s house in Washington last Christmas.
Christmas back in his ordinary life, and his father was watching him. How many holidays had he mourned his father’s passing, felt it most acutely with the taste of egg nog and the smell of pine, and his father had been watching him? Watching him mourn, watching him live his life.
Unless it hadn’t been his father watching him.
What if it had been Jane instead? Jane’s phone was registered to this address. How did she connect to his father?
A file on his mother. The word, eliminated? and the date of her death stamped on the file.
He sank to his knees. Eliminated? The question mark made it worse. Had Henry killed her, even though he himself had nearly died in the accident? He rifled through the file but nothing announced a brutal truth – photos of her and Henry, taken under surveillance, a history of her personal life. Photos of the wrecked car.
‘Mom,’ he said and then he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. His chest ached. What truth about her had been hidden from him? Had she known his father was alive? It was inconceivable she could have kept such a secret from him. And she had gone from being married to a man Luke considered a hero to a man Luke knew was a contemptible snake, the basest traitor.
He gathered the papers. Tucked them into his knapsack, sealed it shut. The other files were on people he did not know, dozens of people whose names meant nothing to him. Except one. A file on Aubrey Perrault, with the word Lindoe alongside in parentheses. He opened it. Empty. All the papers, whatever had been here, were gone. As though Aubrey had been erased.
He heard the whisper of the door open and turned and a young woman stood there, gun in hand. Leveled at him.
‘Don’t raise your gun. Drop it.’ Her accent was British.
He obeyed. She didn’t lower her gun.
‘You’re a bit too late for the reunion,’ she said. ‘Hello, Luke Dantry.’
‘Hello, Jane.’
‘Kick the weapon over to me.’ She sounded like a teacher gently issuing an order to a preschooler.
He did. She kicked the gun under a table.
If she was surprised by his use of her name she didn’t show it. She looked as calm as if she’d just sauntered into a good restaurant to enjoy a glass of wine with friends. But she still didn’t lower the gun. Her voice sounded like ice chipping, falling onto cold steel. She flexed a smile. She might have been pretty once but a hardness cast into her face made her unattractive. ‘Well, thank God you’re safe.’
‘Yes. Thank God I’m safe,’ Luke said. ‘Because I’m the key to all this, aren’t I?’
‘Key?’
‘To your plan. Your scheme.’
‘Scheme sounds so vicious.’
‘I couldn’t figure it out at first. My stepfather thought Quicksilver was behind my kidnapping. It wasn’t them. It was you. You alone. You’re part of Quicksilver, but you were working on your own. You betrayed Quicksilver. You had Eric kill Allen Clifford to get Quicksilver’s attention, to set them off after the Night Road. You were the Quicksilver agent assigned to watch Henry, to watch me, after my mom died. And you discovered the Night Road, and that Henry was getting all this money. You started a war between the two groups. Just so you could grab the Night Road’s money and let Quicksilver take the blame for it.’
‘Very good. I watched your stepfather and a thoroughly nasty billionaire finalize a deal in a London park. That’s why I knew I could steal the money.’ She flexed that awful superior smile again. ‘One can hardly be a traitor to a private company. I prefer the term free agent.’
‘Drummond, and the rest of Quicksilver, didn’t know about the fifty million. Only you did. You kept the information from my dad and the others.’
‘A waste, really,’ she said. ‘You might be smarter than both your fathers.’
‘And I was the perfect pawn for you to use. I had a father in Quicksilver, a stepfather in the Night Road. I get involved, and both sides heat up the war. This is the secret war that Drummond referred
to. It’s not going to be fought in the open. It’s like the new CIA vs KGB.’
Her smile flickered.
Luke said, ‘And that war gives you ample smoke and fire to make a getaway, drop out of sight. You could be presumed dead or captured by the Night Road. You brought Eric to Drummond’s attention, promised him you could hide him from the wrath of the Night Road. He could trade information on the Night Road, Mouser, my stepfather, for his new life. But the fifty million was a secret between the two of you. You’ve let your own friends be murdered and captured. Just for dirty money.’
‘Money isn’t bad. Money’s joy, security, a life free from worry. Rather different from a job with Quicksilver. The benefits package, I found lacking.’ She raised the gun, ever so slightly. Better to hit him between the eyes. ‘You offered Quicksilver the accounts where the money’s been hidden for Aubrey.’
‘Yes. I have the file with the account information.’
‘I have the encryption key.’
‘Two halves of the puzzle. Held by the queen and the pawn.’
‘I despise chess,’ she said, frowning. ‘Give me the account numbers, Luke. Now.’
The martyr watched the target building. He was nervous; he had not expected to go to paradise for weeks, and now he had no time to comport his mind toward calm. People strolled past it; no one came in or out. On the other side was a Christian bookstore, with apartments above it; on the opposite side was an art supply store. Selling the tools to make godless images, he told himself. He tried not to think about the two pretty young women standing outside in the dank air, finishing their Gitanes, laughing. He smoked Gitanes, too. He tried not to look at them but their lovely faces drew his gaze like a magnet. He was weak and temptation was strong. They laughed and the smoke wreathed their faces, and he reminded himself they were devils, nothing more. Paris was a city full of devils. The virgins given in heaven would be far more desirable, flashing eyes, water-pearled thighs and smiles of rapture.
He drove past twice, looking the part of the man seeking that simplest of urban pleasures, a parking spot. When he completed his orbit back in front of the target building he was glad the two girls had either left the street or gone back inside the art shop. He didn’t want to look at them again.
‘You can put the gun down, Jane.’
‘Can I?’
‘Let’s discuss terms,’ Luke said.
The softening of her smile was an acknowledgment that they were moving toward the truth. ‘Terms. You give me the fifty million and you walk away, and you hope the Night Road never finds you. Mouser might flay you alive if he gets his hands on you, and he might not be the wors
t of it.’ She gestured at the photos of Mouser, Snow and Sweet Bird. ‘They’re insane but functional. I’m sure they could take a very memorable vengeance against you.’
‘Two of the three are dead,’ he said. ‘I’m not exactly scared of them the way I was.’
‘I’d kill Mouser if I were you. He won’t give up.’
‘So I give you the money and I get nothing.’ No way she would let him live. She had nothing to gain from it.
‘I’ll offer the same deal I gave Eric. I promised I could buy a new life for him and Aubrey. You keep a quarter-million. You vanish. I’ll help you set up in a nice backwater.’
‘You’re just as bad as the Night Road. You completely screwed up my life, you bitch. For what? So you can have what you want, and everyone else be damned, and you don’t give a shit about innocent people.’
‘You make me sound so bad, Luke. Honestly. It’s a day’s work. We’re keeping cash away from terrorists, after all. I’m much less nasty than the Night Road. Now. The file, please. I have the encryption key on the computer in the other room.’
He stepped into the corridor. He would only get this one chance. She stepped away from the window, the pistol focused on him.
Finally a parking spot directly in front of the building opened up. An elderly man eased his Peugeot out of a slot and, talking to himself, drove down the rue de l’Abbe-Gregoire.
The martyr parked with care; one had to be a good parallel parker to survive in Paris, and he was. He did not weep but he thought of his father, dead two years from a cancer, his mother, who would not understand. The sky was milky with rain. He wondered if there would be cool rain in paradise; he could not remember if weather was mentioned. It felt like someone else was operating his muscles, as though they moved of a different accord than his own brain and heart. He wished for his mother’s touch, he wished he had not seen the girls in the art shop, he wished he had finished school, but none of that would matter. He was being weak. The glory that awaited would surpass all. Wouldn’t it?
The martyr lifted a device that had once been a game controller. Wires led to the gateway to paradise. He was afraid. A tiny voice inside him screamed do not do this.
He silenced the voice with a heaving sigh and pressed the button to the game controller.
52
Jane had followed him into the room with the computer. It sat on a desk, in front of the window. She went behind the desk, gestured with the gun at him to make him stay put.
‘Toss me the key ring.’
He obeyed. She opened the toy, slid the thumb drive into the USB port.
With one hand she ran her fingers along the keyboard, typing. She kept the gun aimed at him with the other hand.
She would have to glance down if the account information appeared. He could rush her then. She would shoot him, he was sure, but if he didn’t do something he was dead anyway.
She kept flicking her glance between the computer screen – which he couldn’t see, but which gave off a dim glow in the darkened room that lit her face with an otherworldly blue – and him. She wouldn’t kill him until she was sure she had what she wanted.
He tensed to jump at her.
‘There it is.’ But Jane’s voice – so confident and snarky – suddenly sounded shaken. ‘Hidden in plain sight, that little b-’
The window – and the world – where Jane stood vanished. A flash, like God opening an eye, blinded Luke. There and gone, only light and dust remaining. He tumbled up and down and sideways through the air and grit where the walls had been and landed against a fist of stone, rubble rained past him where Jane had stood with her rotten gun and her smug smile. Junk hammered a hundred blows into him. Everything seemed pulverized. His scream got lost in his throat and then it was done, the sound and fury gone and then an enormous, wrenching silence.
Luke grew aware that he was still breathing since he was coughing and every hack pierced his ribcage with pain. He tried to move and every muscle cried against the bones and flesh. He could see part of a milk-colored sky above him; the roof was gone, half of it in the street, the other half on top of him. The front of the building was a memory; a curtain of dust marked where the walls stood. Smoke filled his nose. Parts of the rooftop had fallen atop him in a wide scattering. The wall had held, shielding him from the heaviest of the rubble. He blinked. Tried again. He could move his feet. His hands. The floor sagged and a fearsome crack in the floor inched toward him. Beyond that, the mist of dust.
He rose on hands and knees now, testing the bones to see what was broken. His face hurt. His eyes were swollen, blinking hard against the onslaught of grit and the bright sun-smashing flash of the blast. He crawled away from the crack, from the edge of the floor – he remembered that he was six stories up.
‘What the hell, what the hell, what the hell,’ he mumbled to himself. He tried to get his bearings. The building could collapse. Would collapse. He had a horror of being trapped, entombed alive with tons of rubble sealing him away, succumbing to a slow, lonely death. The fear cut through the haze. He crawled along hands and knees. The stairs he had come up had to be gone now, in the front of the building, but there had to be back stairs.
The floor groaned, sagged, and he nearly fell. Below him he heard a rumble, walls tumbling away. The floor canted hard; he could not see past the swirling dust. He heard the shrill cry of a police siren. Help was coming.
He tried to remember the layout of the building. Stairs. Reception. Hallway. Offices on both sides.
He realized he was crawling the wrong way through the gritty fog. He turned and hoped he didn’t crawl off the edge. He splayed fingers in front of him, feeling, reaching. He found wall. A door. Blown inward by the blast, at a broken angle, wrenched clean off the hinges. He fumbled forward. Nothing but wall, more wall. A dead end. No back stairs. He crawled back out into the shattered hallway.
The building moaned. He thought it might well have been built before the days of steel beams and might be straining to stay erect, held together only by chance.
He found another door, also caved in by the force. He crawled under its twisted wreckage and the floor ended. He reached a few inches below and found only space. Stuck out a leg and his toes found the rest of the shattered stairway. He put his weight on a step and it held. Then both feet, and he lowered himself down. He sat down on his butt, shivering. Then he eased down on his belly, snaking along the stairs.
He slid down the top three stories. At the next one the walls didn’t look so cracked from the force of the roof’s collapse and he got to his feet. He tested the stairs with his feet. Behind him the stairway stood in a crazy, dust-choked warp.
When he reached the bottom, the stairway was slashed apart at the bottom floor. What looked like large chunks of a smoldering car were wedged where the steps would have once been.
He jumped down from the stairs into broken glass, burning rubber, twisted hot metal. Rubble made a moonscape of the street. The buildings on both sides were damaged as well, their facades ripped away, but their frames holding. Fire surged out the top of one of the buildings.
He stumbled through broken brick and scorched stone. Wreckage choked the street.
No sign of Jane. She’d been vaporized in the blast. But what the hell had happened?
Bomb.
The Night Road was attacking Quicksilver. They’d found his father’s people, maybe his father had talked. Or Aubrey. And they’d gone after Quicksilver with a murderous rage. They’d used bombs in the attacks at the high school and the chlorine train. And now here.
He coughed and spat blood. Hands touched him. He looked up. A young woman spoke French to him in soothing tones. He could start to hear her words over the hum in his ears. She tried to help him walk. He saw walking wounded, stunned, a woman clutching her broken arm, an old man with a brutal gash across his bald pate. Luke touched his own face and probed a wet mask of blood. The pain in his body turned savage, like a beast awakening inside his bones.
The young woman kep
t talking, soothingly in the lovely French, supporting him, and through the dust he saw the cream-colored sky.
He pulled away from her. She wouldn’t let him go and at the end of the road, he could see police arriving, ambulances with lights, fire trucks.
‘ Non,’ he said.
She spoke French he didn’t understand and pulled at him. No doubt she thought he was in shock. No doubt she was right. But the police, no. They would want to know who he was. Why he was there. And they would find out he was wanted in the United States. No.
He abandoned his kind savior with a thank-you, shrugged free of her grasp. He stumbled past the crowds that were gathering at one end of the street and people stopped him, trying to help him, sure that he was shaken. He pulled away. He staggered past a crowd that had spilled out of a restaurant. He went inside, to the bathroom, and was sick. He stood and studied himself in the mirror. Both his eyes were swollen, blackening with bruising. A tooth on the left side of his mouth was gone. His lips were heavy, like he’d taken a punch. A score of cuts along his forehead, up into the hairline, a bad one across his nose. Another one on his chin. His whole body throbbed like a bruise. His hair stood in spikes, dusty. His shirt was in shreds and he could see the red, scraped skin underneath. He felt the silver medal of Saint Michael, covered in grit.
He washed the blood and gunk from his face. He realized he’d lost his gun. In the dining area he saw an array of cutlery at a service station, and selected a sharp knife. He didn’t want to be unarmed. He put the knife in his waistband.
He went back out into the street and a man wearing an apron stopped him and in French said, ‘You should go to hospital, sir, do you need help?’
