by Jeff Abbott
‘Is it liberating to order me about?’ Henry sounded almost amused.
‘The spine, Henry, is where I’ll put the bullet. If you survive a nurse will wipe your chin and change your diaper.’ He knew Henry well enough to know the merest thought of a lack of control would frighten him.
Henry steered the car to an entrance. ‘The camera’s on me,’ he said.
‘Don’t talk. I don’t want them wondering who you’re talking to.’ Henry shut up. He entered an access code; the tasteless baroque iron gates hinged back and swung open with a false grandeur. He drove in.
‘What will be expected of you?’ Luke asked.
‘For me to drive to the back house.’
The odds were bad. Four to one, really, because Henry wasn’t on his side. Henry was only on his own side. Luke leaned closer to the floor of the sedan, keeping a tight grip on the gun. Fear prickled every bone in his body, and then the fear shrank, became smaller than himself.
The sedan stopped. ‘We’re at the house. The doors will be locked.’
Luke peered over the edge of the back seat. The back house was built of stone, studded with a few windows. ‘Do you have a key?’
‘Yes, Luke, I do.’
‘Out.’
Henry got out of the car. Luke walked close behind him and kept the knife at his ribs.
Henry unlocked the door. Luke pushed him, used him as a shield, and Henry didn’t complain. They moved from the front door, across a living room, into a back kitchen. The house was silent as a grave. Or maybe, Luke thought crazily, a grave was louder. For a hub of terrorist activity, it was far too silent. Luke’s skin tingled as though warmed by fire.
‘They’re gone,’ Henry said.
Luke listened to the pressing silence of the house. He heard a creak on the stairs.
Henry was a liar.
Luke kept his grip on Henry but he moved the gun away from his neck, kept it aimed over his shoulder. He listened for the next creak. Heard nothing. He kicked open a back door, yanked Henry away from the wash of cool air, pulled him back into a corner.
Five seconds later he saw the gun come into sight from around the open door. The edge of the barrel, then hand gripping the guard, then arm.
Luke aimed and fired twice in rapid succession. The gun kicked more than he thought it would. The first bullet scored; the second missed. The sleeve, halfway up, pulled and smoked and produced a bright flush of blood. The thug fell against the door and raised the gun but Luke threw Henry into the thug. Henry tackled him. Closing arms around him, they staggered into the wall, sliding to the floor.
The thug screamed a babble of rage in his own language. He punched Henry hard; Henry went down, but clawed at the thug’s hair. They grappled, and Luke looked for the shot.
Just shoot them both, he thought, but he couldn’t.
The thug shoved Henry clear, sending him crashing into and over a kitchen table. The thug slid to the floor, his arm bright with blood. His hands empty.
Where the hell was the guy’s gun? Gone.
Henry. That conniving bastard had grabbed it. He glanced over at the corner of the kitchen where Henry had landed. Gone.
Luke pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. Or the clip was now empty. Or he didn’t know how to use it. The gun was useless.
The thug launched himself at Luke; his fingers dug into Luke’s throat, squeezed into the flesh. Luke gripped his hands, tried to pry them free, kicked his feet along the floor. He was bigger and taller than his attacker but the guy had the advantage of strength and experience.
The guy slammed Luke’s head against the tile. Luke released his futile grip on the guy’s hands. He pushed off the floor, came close to the guy’s chest. He threw one arm around in an embrace and as he did so, searched along his own waist for the knife he’d taken from the restaurant after the bombing.
Luke slid the blade hard into the guy’s side. Felt it touch bone and the guy howled. No second chance. Luke stabbed and pulled out again and the wash of blood was warm, awful; and he drove the blade upwards, into the guy’s throat.
The guy toppled. Dying. Luke kicked out from under him, hand slick with blood, the breath frozen in his half-strangled throat.
He looked up from the dying man and Henry stood above him, gun in hand.
‘No one else is here. The house is empty. I had to be sure,’ Henry said calmly.
Luke stared at him, kicked away from the dying terrorist. The thug lay on the floor, gasping out air and blood, a froth on his lips. His eyes stretched wide in fear, in horror, in pain. Luke couldn’t look away. It was all the ugliness of slow death, laid bare. He had killed Snow but she had died within seconds. It did not matter that the man deserved it. Luke felt something shift in his chest, in his brain, watching death unfold.
The dying man coughed and writhed and his eyes pleaded for a question he couldn’t ask. Unlike the near-instant deaths he had seen – Snow, Chris, the poor officer in the Chicago alleyway – this dying took time. They watched his pain.
‘For God’s sakes, put him out of his misery,’ Luke said.
Henry glanced at the gun he held and remained motionless.
The thug coughed and gurgled blood, clutching his wound, and then he lay still.
‘My God, that was messy. You for sure killed him,’ Henry said. ‘Let’s get you washed.’
Luke tore his gaze away from the dead man and looked up at Henry. Get me washed, like I was a child caught playing in the mud. Henry held the gun but it wasn’t aimed at him.
‘You could have shot him,’ Luke said. ‘You could have ended the fight so I didn’t have to…’
‘So you didn’t have to do what was necessary? You handled it.’ Henry’s voice was flat. ‘I had to make sure no one else was here, attacking our flank. Everyone else is gone.’
Our flank. Like they were a team. The shock of killing had eroded the anger he felt toward Henry. But Henry had the gun.
Luke wondered if Henry would shoot him. He didn’t really know Henry. He only knew the lie Henry was.
‘You hung back to see if I’d win. What are you trying to make me into? You?’ Luke stood and the rage he’d felt while stabbing the thug tingled hard in his hands. ‘You used me to build your terrorist network. You made it so I can’t go to the police. That I can only turn to you.’
‘We’re family,’ he said quietly.
‘You involved me only to bind me to you. You destroyed my options in life and left me with yours. So I would join you?’ It was the horrifying truth that lay between them. ‘You think that because you had me build the Night Road, and hide from the police, and now made me kill, I’m somehow more like you?’ He spat at Henry’s shoe. ‘We could not be more different.’
‘You’re all the family I have, Luke. The only family I’ve ever had.’ He mouthed the words with difficulty. He tried an expression that was distantly related to a smile. ‘I wanted us together.’
‘What, in jail cells? If you wanted to be my family, you could have had your normal life and let me have mine. You don’t know what family is.’
‘I know we don’t turn on each other in a time of need.’ Henry wet a hand towel, tossed it to Luke, as though cleaning the blood off his hands was as everyday for him as a gardener wiping dirt. ‘Clearly, since Mouser and everyone else is gone, and this man was waiting here to kill me, I’m on the outs with Mouser and the Night Road,’ Henry said. ‘You and I have to come to an agreement, Luke. An opportunity confronts us.’
‘This isn’t like we’ve had a fight about a family issue,’ Luke said. ‘There is no agreement. No opportunity. You tell me where Mouser took them.’
‘I assume Chicago, on a Travport plane. He thinks he can find the fifty million by tracing Eric’s activities at the private bank that Eric worked for. The money, Luke. Where is that money?’
‘Your so-clever bomb destroyed the encrypted file that contained the account info. Jane decrypted it. But I didn’t see it and all the evidence was destroyed.’
‘She said nothing about where it was?’
‘No.’ Only her final words of anger. Hidden in plain sight, that little b ‘If you and I take the fifty million before they do, well, the Night Road is done. It will fall apart without the promised money and the billionaire won’t try and invest in terror again. You and I can hide. All is well.’
‘Not for my father and Aubrey.’
Henry’s lips thinned. Laughing, but not wanting to show he was laughing. Because Henry had the gun. ‘Trying to save them is suicide. They’ll kill you.’
He punched his stepfather, hard, fist to jaw. Henry sagged to the floor, agony on his face. He swung the gun back toward Luke. But he didn’t fire.
Henry said thickly, ‘I’m trying to save you…’
‘Quit lying. Just quit.’ Luke kicked his stepfather. Hard. In the stomach. He did it before he even realized it. All the air went out of Henry’s lungs. Luke hit him again in the face and a great sorrow rose in him, for this man who’d cared for him, been his friend, tried to be his father. It was all a most vicious, damnable lie. He could kill him. But there were things worse than death.
‘Tell me where these bombs will be placed. Or I’ll kill you.’
‘They’ll change their targets, because Mouser’s shut me out. They’ll be afraid I’ll cut a deal with the authorities.’
‘Humor me. What are the original targets?’
‘Shopping centers. Striking at ordinary people. Easy to deploy.’ Henry turned his face to the floor. ‘But I’m telling you, they’ll abandon that plan because they’re under such pressure and so much has gone wrong. Mouser will… think bigger. He’ll make Hellfire a memorial to Snow.’
He dragged Henry into the kitchen. He went into the bedroom off the hall; a pair of abandoned handcuffs lay on the bed, probably used for his father or Aubrey. He went back into the kitchen; Henry lay curled on the floor, in a fetal position, coughing. Luke dragged Henry to the dead guard. Snapped the cuffs on Henry’s right wrist, reached for the dead man’s wrist.
‘Please, Luke, don’t!’
The cuff clicked home. ‘I’ll leave you with your friend. You belong together more than you and I do.’
‘Don’t! I can help you!’
‘Tell me where in Chicago Mouser will take them.’
‘You’ll really let me go.’
‘Yes, Henry. Tell me where they will be.’
Henry took a hard breath. ‘He’s got the Night Road members who are carrying out the attack meeting at Aubrey’s office.’
‘For Hellfire.’
‘Yes. The final meeting before they launch the attack. Take me with you, I can talk to them for you.’
‘I’ll talk to them,’ Luke said.
‘You’ll need a password. They’ll kill you at first sight without a password,’ Henry called. ‘Let me go and I’ll tell it to you.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s “determination”.’
Luke turned and started to walk away.
‘You said you’d let me go.’ Henry’s whisper became a wail. He raised his arm; the dead man’s arm went up as well, as if in a final plea for mercy.
‘I lied.’ He stared at his stepfather. ‘If I ever see you again, I will kill you.’
Luke went upstairs and he washed his face, his hair, scrubbing the blood away.
‘Luke?’
In a closet, he found a clean shirt and clean pants that nearly fit. He dumped his bloody clothes on the floor.
‘Luke? Please. Don’t leave me.’
He searched through a briefcase he recognized as Henry’s. There was an electronic passkey on it, labeled PERRAULT IMPORTS. Aubrey’s company. He held it up to Henry when he reached the bottom of the stairs.
‘Eric sent it, so we would have access when the time came.’
Luke didn’t speak a word; he walked past Henry, shackled to the dead man, and he never looked back at his stepfather.
‘Luke! Luke! Please don’t leave me like this.’
Luke shut the door behind him.
Luke got into Henry’s car and drove to Charles de Gaulle airport. When he got there, he rebooked his flight on the return ticket he had in the system and changed it to Chicago. He had a while to wait. He found a pay phone and called the police. In broken French he told them where they could find one of the people responsible for the afternoon’s bombing in Paris, chained to a dead man. Then he hung up.
Henry, he thought, would not do prison well.
54
On the long flight to Chicago, Luke Dantry sat with his battered, bruised face behind dark glasses and made his plans, filling a little notebook he’d bought at the airport with scribblings, and put it in his pocket. Things he wanted to tell his father, ask his father, if they made it alive through this horror. But he also thought about how the Night Road might use its hundred-plus bombs.
The plane, to his horror, was grounded in New York due to inclement weather in Chicago. They sat on the runway for an extra six hours. Luke felt sick with waiting. Finally the jet took off again; it lost another hour orbiting Chicago as the last of a violent storm cell cleared out from the city.
When he got off the plane into the dark Chicago midnight, he knew the danger would be after clearing customs, after walking toward his rental car, that the Night Road could be waiting for him.
He could not shake Henry from his thoughts. Let him know abandonment, let him feel what it was like to have your life taken from you and wadded up like trash.
He walked toward the rental car station. He kept glancing over his shoulder, because whether it was Quicksilver or the Night Road, they had known how to find him when he traveled. To trap him. Not again. He signed off the rental car paperwork, using the false ID and credit card Drummond had left him. He walked out into the parking garage and found his car on the top level. The attendant had him inspect the car for pre-existing damage, and sign the form. He barely looked at the rental, a Lincoln Navigator SUV, and scrawled his false passport name on the paper.
The attendant said, ‘One second, I’ll get you the keys.’ He vanished into the office and when the door opened again it wasn’t the attendant, it was Frankie Wu, the pilot who had flown him and Aubrey to Chicago for Quicksilver.
Luke froze. Glanced around. All the attendants seemed to have disappeared.
‘Are you all right?’ Frankie Wu asked.
‘Yes.’ He’s part of Quicksilver, he’ll help me, Luke thought. Luke wouldn’t have to do this alone.
‘Let’s get in the car,’ Frankie said, gently. ‘We can talk about your dad.’
Wu got behind the wheel. The passenger seat was full of gear, and Wu didn’t move it, so Luke sat in the back.
They got in the Navigator, drove out of the garage – Luke noticed that the guard at the exit simply waved Frankie Wu through, no checking of the rental car papers – and into the darkness.
‘My dad. I have to go help my dad,’ Luke said. ‘You have to help me.’
‘No, Luke,’ Wu said, ‘I have my orders. We don’t engage with the Night Road. I’m sorry.’
55
‘How did you find me?’ Luke asked. His voice sounded small in the quiet of the car.
‘You traveled under the ID Drummond got for you. We get a ping every time you use it. Especially after Paris was charged with recovering you and the office got blown the hell up.’ Anger stormed Wu’s voice.
‘Then be mad at the Night Road. They attacked your offices, in New York and Paris.’
‘We’ve lost a lot of good people because of you.’
‘Because of a traitor inside Quicksilver. A British woman who called herself Jane. I don’t know what her real name was. But she’s the one who’s put the Night Road and Quicksilver at each other’s throats, she was behind my kidnapping, killing Allen Clifford in Houston, trying to steal the Night Road’s money.’
‘What matters is us surviving another day to fight them. They’ve taken out two of our centers trying to kill you. You matter to them
. So it’s my job, and my only job, to get you somewhere safe. Another team will arrive soon to help me.’
Frustration was a claw in Luke’s chest. ‘That will be too late. You have to help me now. They’re here. They’re planning a massive bombing attack, maybe on shopping centers, maybe on some other target. They have dozens of bombs ready. We can’t wait, we have to act now.’
Wu looked at him in the rearview with a gaze cold as chrome. ‘I have my orders. Get you to a safe place where you can be protected and debriefed about the Night Road.’
‘You don’t understand. They have my father. They have my friend. They’ve brought them here.’
‘I have my orders. I’m sorry. I’m just one guy.’ Wu steered onto a highway.
‘For God’s sakes. Please. Aren’t you part of the CIA or something? You can’t be just one guy left.’
Wu didn’t answer.
‘Listen to me.’ He told Wu how Paris had gone wrong. ‘They’re here, within our grasp. They’ve kept my dad alive to pick his brain about Quicksilver, and don’t doubt for a second they will torture him within an inch of his life. And they’re keeping Aubrey alive to access Eric’s accounts at the bank; they think she can help them get inside the bank since she’s a client. If they find this fifty million, they can fund terrorists all over America, they can wreak a hell of a lot more havoc. Terrorism is cheap, they can fund an endless chaos, far more than we’ve ever seen before. They’ve got an Arab billionaire investing in domestic terrorism. Don’t you realize how dangerous they are?’
‘The last thing I can do with Quicksilver in tatters is to attack alone.’
‘You have me.’
‘You. No. You’re not trained.’
‘I’ve held my own.’
‘It would be suicide.’
‘Then let me call the police,’ Luke said, ‘Tell them.’
‘Tell them what?’
‘I have information on a massive attack that the Night Road is planning. They’re massing here in Chicago, to distribute dozens of bombs to their members but I don’t know which cities they’ll hit.’
‘No evidence. No certainty. And you tell them about this, you have to tell them about Quicksilver. I’m not authorized.’
