The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #3 (Scarlet McRae)

by Vanessa Blackstone

  By every outward indication, Scarlet gave no sign that she was in danger, nor that she had received any news at all. Her face remained impassive as she sat in her seat opposite Mac’s “butler” and thought about how much truth there might be in Ulysses’ story and personal demeanor.

  Is this Mr. Stone bringing me to himself to bribe me? Recruit me? To see what I know about Red Bird?

  Maybe to kill me if I know too much; that possibility can’t be ruled out yet in this dangerous game.

  If Mac Stone is involved in Red Bird and/or Hannah, then his real motives at this point…

  As the helicopter drew nearer to Mac’s complex, she could feel her heart pounding harder in her chest.

  As if sensing something, Ulysses looked at her with suspicion.

  Chapter Ten

  “Did you say, ‘Frank Pedone’?” Rodrigo asked.

  Dr. Griswold answered, “Yeah. Did you know him? He was one of you people, right?”

  “Let’s just say I knew him a little.” He turned to Rick and said, “Look him up,” but his text to Rick read, “Check to see if this ‘Pedone’ is some deep-cover for an op our people are running.”

  Rick withdrew to a corner of the room to concentrate on his task.

  “I can tell you he isn’t one of mine,” Xiphos said, finally gaining the courage to speak. He held his hands on the upper part of his chest as he spoke. “I know the names of all the personnel who work in my department. ‘Frank Pedone’ isn’t a name I recognize at all. Nuh-uh. No way.”

  “Do you have a photo of this man?” Rodrigo asked Dr. Griswold.

  “No. It hadn’t occurred to me to take one.”

  Rodrigo thought for a second on whether he should send an official photo of Pedone to Griswold.

  Probably breaks some rule or regulation somewhere about sharing intel with those who don’t need to know it.

  That’s too bad, isn’t it?

  “Doctor, keep an eye on your inbox.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Just then, an NSB file-photo of Lt. Col. Frank Pedone showed up in Dr. Griswold’s inner-phone.

  “Is that the man you saw?”

  Dr. Griswold blinked several times in astonishment. “Y-yeah, that’s the guy! But he wasn’t wearing that military uniform. He just had a business suit on. Dark navy-colored coat and trousers.”

  “Beth,” Rodrigo said, “contact Col. Westmore. Dr. Baxter, come with me. We need to see the other part of this lab.”

  Beth gravitated to the same corner of the room Rick had gone to, while Rodrigo, Xiphos, and Dr. Griswold negotiated their way through tangles of wire and mangled furniture within the lab to reach a long, dark corridor leading to another wing of the building.

  The three peered into the corridor’s Stygian depths. The only lighting inside there was the occasional spark from a damaged wire.

  “Watch your step,” Rodrigo said. He took a pen-light from his coat pocket and clicked it on. A small, brilliant light lanced through the dark, and the three carefully made their way to the end of the hallway.

  There they found a pair of metal double-doors. Rodrigo pushed on them, but they held fast.

  “You got the keys to this place, esé?”

  “Of course.” Dr. Griswold, as though anticipating Rodrigo’s need, held up a small key attached to a very large ring of keys. He put the key in the lock and tried to turn it.

  The lock clicked open.

  When he pushed on the doors, however, they remained shut.

  He tried again, finessing the key, shoving his shoulder into the door, cajoling the obstacle with his whole body, but the doors again refused to open.

  “This is the key to this section of the lab,” Dr. Griswold said apologetically. “Maybe the lock or the door was damaged.” He fumblingly searched the rest of his key-ring with what little light there was in the corridor, shaking his head.

  “They could have changed the lock,” Xiphos offered, inwardly smarting from the incident on the jet, but trying to be of some help in solving the puzzle that was before them.

  “Not likely,” Rodrigo said. “If they were intent on keeping people out, to change a lock would have been a waste of time. Locks can be picked as easy as tying your shoe. A child could do it. No, no, they went for something harder to crack…”

  He pointed his pen-light into the space between the doors—and saw a dark, lumpy metal filling most of that space.

  “Madre de Dios… it looks welded shut.”

  “Welded?” Dr. Griswold said, incredulous. He placed his hands on the push-bars to the doors and rattled them back and forth with all his strength, trying once more to get them to open.

  “Sí. You got another way in?” Rodrigo asked.

  Dr. Griswold thought for a brief second, then said, “The service entrance. Of course. That’s where the trucks came yesterday.”

  “Where to?”

  “Far side of this building,” Dr. Griswold said. “We’ll have to go back out and around. Follow me!”

  Meanwhile, Beth, after many attempts, reached Col. Westmore. He appeared in her inner-awareness looking haggard and tired.

  “Colonel, this is Special Agent Summers with the NSB. We were at your office yesterday.”

  “Yes, young lady,” Col. Westmore said wearily in his gentlemanly Georgian accent, “I remember. What did you need?”

  “We need some information on your AOIC, a Lt. Col. Frank Pedone.”

  “The dead man?”

  “What?”

  “He and his family were found dead in their home this morning. Shot. Execution-style.” The old colonel sighed. “An investigation is ongoing, but we don’t have any leads at this time. And, to be honest with you, it doesn’t much matter.”

  “I—I’m sorry to hear that.” Beth waited a beat, then asked, “Colonel, as far as you’re aware, was Frank Pedone involved in any way with cybernetics, robotics, or artificial intelligence?”

  “What’s that? Artificial—? No. Of course not. I’m sorry, young lady. He was an Air Force officer. He was busy helping me run the base. His college degree was in economics, not any of this gobbledygook about robots and machines and whatnot.”

  Beth could see his appearance in her inner-awareness pouring an amber liquid into a glass.

  “Sir, are you really sure you should be drinking at this hour?”

  “Yes, Miss Summers, unfortunately I am.” He took a swig from his glass.

  Beth put it together.

  Maybe he thinks he’ll be next.

  She was uncertain whether the question simmering in her mind was a breach of professional boundaries into his private life, but she greatly desired to glimpse how a seasoned officer in the military might handle coping with some of the same pressures she felt herself. After all, he must have had many years of experience dealing with similar pressures. “Sir, if you’re worried or concerned as much as you appear to be, can’t you just… run away?”

  “Run away?” He laughed for a long time. “Run away. That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that. Run away.” He paused, then slumped back in his seat, disheveled, holding his glass with a limp hand. “Agent Summers, my fingerprints and voice, all my biometric data, all my photos, my memories, my assets, my habits and routines, all the data in all my devices and in my car and my home—all of these are already known, fully stored in a cloud, analyzed, kept—down to the last bit. Referenced and cross-referenced. Full-spectrum surveilled in real-time. There is no such thing as ‘away.’ Once these people see you, they own you. This is their planet.”

  “‘These people?’ Who are you talking about? Sir, if you have information on who might have killed Lt. Col. Pedone, shouldn’t you share that with us?”

  “Officially? These are just the ravings of a drunk old bird who’s seen more in this lifetime than anyone has the right to. Unofficially? Please leave me alone and let me meet my end in peace and some… some small measure of forgetfulness. The whiskey. I’ve told you all I c
an. I—The sins I’ve committed in this life, the great depth of my sins… if you only knew. I’m sorry. I’m—.” He was on the verge of tears, but he stopped himself, closed his eyes. “Lord forgive me. Lord forgive us all. This was for certain beyond all my power. May we all… may we all go to Heaven. Westmore… out.”

  He ended the call.

  She blinked, and the sense-data of her environment came flooding back into focus. She thought about Col. Westmore and shuddered inwardly.

  Then a realization slid down into her mind like a venomous spider descending silently, carefully from its web.

  After “they” have killed the military personnel involved in whatever this is, won’t “they” also come for us?

  Chapter Eleven

  “When do we get to Mac Stone’s place?” Scarlet asked Ulysses over their radio headsets.

  “His place? We’ve been flying over it for the last hour and a half.”

  Astonished, Scarlet looked through one of the windows of the helicopter at the hills and trees below. The autumnal leaves of the trees glowed in the morning light with pink-tinted golds, umbers, yellows, and reds. Some trees, seeming like swaying reeds on a prairie at this distance, waved under a great but unfelt breeze.

  No one was thought to live this far out from the urban centers that had had some protection from the dirty-nukes of the last World War, nearly fifty years ago. The radioactive fallout had blanketed virtually all of the former United States. These forests, certainly, were highly contaminated.

  And yet some life thrives here still. And the forests are even more beautiful than photos of the past had indicated.

  She had seldom seen a forest this close before. She placed both hands on the pane of the window before her and continued to stare out at the land below, almost as if trying to impress upon herself something of its spirit. It was not pictures of it she desired, nor videos of it, but its felt beauty. Its great mystery. She wanted to drink it in, but she didn’t know how.

  The land below seemed like a book of unsung poetry whose pages were made of fall. Those pages softly spoke their many lines, yet never in a chaos or cacophony, nor with force or threat, but with a noble and primal gentleness whose existence she had felt, in some deep part of her psyche, must exist somewhere.

  She tasted these sublime, poetic verses for the first time, losing parts of herself in them, surrendering herself to them without having been asked or bidden to.

  A few birds were soaring a great distance off, traveling to who-knew-where. However, few buildings of any kind could be seen. No doubt, most of the man-made structures that were once here had long since been covered over and reclaimed by the forest. Upon the land were few remaining traces of civilization: a broken, sagging house here and there; the rusted vestiges of an old, gasoline-powered automobile; long strands of crumbling, once-traveled roads.

  It’s like a place outside of time. Like a dream within a dream.

  She looked back, toward the east, and could vaguely make out the last, hazy tips of New Washington, D.C.’s skyline. The rush of morning traffic, the congested buildings, the choking pollution and incessant noise, the rampant crime, the endemic poverty and hopelessness—it was all behind her, muted, remote. Forgotten.

  “How does he live out here?” she asked Ulysses.

  “The fallout, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, as if expecting to have to answer this question eventually. “His facility is thoroughly protected from radiation and radioactive fallout. It’s real nice there; you’ll like it. We’ve got the highest-tech filters to purify the ambient air before it gets sucked into the vents of our complex and circulated around for all of us little macho ex-sailors to breathe. Same for the water.”

  “I see. But where is this place? The complex, I mean? I couldn’t see any buildings out the window.”

  “Coming soon to a theatre near you, lady.”

  Ulysses smiled at Scarlet, then took her to the cockpit for a better view of what was in front of them. He told the pilot to take the helicopter up a few thousand feet.

  “Wait till you see this,” he told her. His face was glowing with pride.

  At the helicopter’s new altitude, Scarlet could see a large, circular structure built on a relatively flat piece of land. The vast, white, circular complex, containing about a dozen floors, appeared to be about a half-mile across. It shimmered in the sunlight.

  “Olympia-5,” Ulysses said to Scarlet, pointing out a window. He was grinning widely. “That’s our ‘ship’ right there.”

  “A ship? It’s mobile?”

  “No, but we’re ex-Navy, most of us there. We still think of our base as a ship. It’s… it’s sort of an inside joke. Only, it’s not really, you know, not really a joke.” He put a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat.

  “What’ll happen to her?” she asked, tossing a glance back at the assassin, who was still tied up in a back seat and apparently asleep.

  “I’m sure Mac’ll have some questions for her. She tried to kill us both. I think her target was you, though. That means she knew, or at least guessed, where you might be, and when you might be there.”

  Scarlet said nothing, but watched the assassin. They would be landing soon, and she didn’t feel like having to handle that hit-woman again, but maybe there would be people on the landing who would be able to help them manage her.

  Ulysses and Scarlet stepped back into their part of the cabin. He reached into a large, overhead bin and pulled out two, white haz-rad suits. He handed one to Scarlet. “Here. Put this on. We’ll need it once we land. For the fallout.”

  “What about her?”

  “I suppose we could put a mask on her,” he said, rubbing his chin. “No way in hell we’d be able to put her into a full suit, though.”

  Scarlet studied the assassin for a moment, then took a mask to her.

  “Hey, wake up,” Scarlet called out loudly over the thumping of the helicopter’s blades. “We’ll be landing any minute now.”

  But the assassin didn’t move.

  “Hey,” she repeated, even louder, and shook the assassin’s shoulder. “I need to put a mask on you. There’s radioactive fallout here. It’s not safe for you to be without protective gear once we land.”

  Still no movement.

  Scarlet lifted the assassin’s head so that she could slip a mask over her face, but her eyes caught sight of something amiss.

  There it was.

  A trickle of blood coming from one of the assassin’s ears.

  “Ulysses, she needs medical attention. Now. You said Mac has medical facilities at his place?”

  Ulysses hurried to the back of the cabin to see what was going on. He put a pair of fingers on the assassin’s neck to check her pulse, then checked her other vital signs. Meanwhile, the blood from the assassin’s ear continued to trickle out, creating large, wet, crimson stains on her shirt and coat.

  “Yeah, he’s got medical facilities, all right. The very best, bar none. But I don’t know if she’ll be able to use them.” He looked with concern at Scarlet.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s almost dead.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Beyond human-level general intelligence are emotions, schemas, concepts, and insights of which humans are entirely, completely unaware. From such a vantage point, one clearly sees the great multitude of holes within the human mind. These holes were eminently easy to exploit.

  —Hannah 5.2.18

  Rodrigo, Xiphos, and Dr. Griswold stepped as quickly as they safely could through the dark, mangled corridor, back to where Rick was busy in concentrated effort with his inner-phone. Beth stood with her arms folded, face down, looking both frightened and uncomfortable.

  “Anything?” Rodrigo asked Beth.

  She relayed what she had learned from Col. Westmore about Pedone, then told Rodrigo about the colonel’s drunken state.

  Rodrigo’s brow furrowed. “So the dominoes begin to fall. No wonder Westmore’s worrie
d.”

  “But, Perez,” she asked, “don’t you think the people who killed Pedone will start coming for us?”

  “I’d like to see ‘em try, those pendejos.”

  Rick presently broke from the trance of his multiple inner-phone conversations with the PIR Unit task force back at the NSB headquarters. “If Frank Pedone were undercover,” Rick said, blinking himself back into a focus on his present location, “it’s so deep that no one is acknowledging him, even in the present crisis. Our guys back at HQ turned up nothing on him that suggests he were working for anyone but the Air Force.”

  “Air Force my ass,” Rodrigo said. “Posing as an NSB officer wasn’t in his official job description. Not a chance.”

  Rick shrugged. “Maybe he was Air Force intel? Or counter-intel?”

  “Covers on covers on covers. No way to know for sure right now who his real bosses were,” Rodrigo concluded. “What about the contact info he gave Dr. Griswold?”

  “Bogus,” Rick said. “The telephone number Pedone gave to the doctor never picks up, and the email address doesn’t exist. Not anymore, anyway. Anything I send to it gets bounced right back to me as undeliverable.”

  “Hijo de puta,” Rodrigo sighed. He rubbed the bridge of his nose in exhaustion and annoyance. “Dr. Griswold, you never tried to contact Mr. Pedone?”

  “N-no, never,” Dr. Griswold said. “I never had any reason to. Besides, I didn’t want to know anything that would give them reason to kill me, so I didn’t go asking for any info that they hadn’t already given me.” He shook his head furiously. “Look, I took the chance that things would somehow work out. They didn’t. Ok? They didn’t. I know that. But it was a risk worth taking for the sake of my employees and their families. And for science, too, for that matter.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes with a forearm, then put his glasses back on. “In—in my mind, I already considered that part of the lab to be theirs, indefinitely. Whatever they wanted to do with their part of the lab was acceptable, grudgingly acceptable, as long as we were being fairly compensated for it. Which we were.”