A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  Jay, of course, had decided, at that moment, to climb up onto their roof. Nick knew Jay wanted to watch for Soviet tanks. Everyone knew the tanks were coming, that Soviet paratroopers were going to parachute out of the sky like in the new movie Red Dawn—just like they had in Afghanistan. When Nick was six years old, his mother had woken him up Christmas morning to tell him her homeland had been attacked. “You were born here, but you were first in Mâmân’s belly in Afghanistan,” she had said to Nick. “That is your homeland too.”

  This had confused Nick, because he had been born in America, and while he liked Mâmân’s lamb kofta and all his various “uncles” from the Afghan community in San Diego, each of whom had told Nick how beautiful a bride his mother had been and how fortunate his father was to have married her, Nick had never been to Afghanistan, so how could that be home? He hadn’t understood why his mother insisted he and Jay go to a nearby mosque for religious instruction, or why they call her Mâmân instead of Mommy, or why he should feel any connection to a country he had never seen.

  Now that he was a few years older, Nick saw things more simply—Dad had to take care of Mâmân, and Nick had to take care of Jay.

  And now Jay was on the roof when Nick was supposed to be keeping him safe.

  “Jay!” Nick hissed from the backyard patio, staring up at the roof. It was dark that night, with no moon, but he had seen Jay climbing over the lip of the roof before vanishing. “Jay!” he called again.

  Jay’s voice floated down from the dark. “Go away.”

  “Mâmân will kill you,” Nick hissed.

  Nothing.

  Cursing under his breath, Nick climbed up the downspout and grasped the edge of the roof with one hand, then another, until he was dangling with his feet over the stones of the patio. It was only a single story high, but Nick knew a fall could be bad. Then he hauled himself up, getting one leg over the gutter and onto the shingles, which gave him enough leverage to finally clamber onto the roof and crouch there, catching his breath.

  Something small and hard struck his chest, then his head. “Ouch!” He glared into the dark, and then he saw Jay above him on the ridge of the roof, arm back, ready to throw another pebble. “Stop it!”

  “Go away,” Jay said.

  “You need to come down here right now,” Nick said. “You could fall. Mâmân will be so mad.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Then their father’s voice, like a lash in the night. “Boys!”

  Nick heard Jay’s startled gasp, and as he tried to turn around on the roof to look for his father, his foot slipped. He fell hard onto his hip and slid down the tiles, barely having time to scrabble for a handhold before he rolled off the edge and dropped onto the patio. When he hit the stones, something exploded in his left elbow, and he shrieked from the pain, a bright yellow universe of it.

  He had broken his arm just above the elbow. His parents had to take him to the hospital that night, and the pain of his broken arm was almost worth the concern and attention his mother lavished on him, bringing him bowls of warm aush in bed and calling him her brave moosh, never mind that being called a brave mouse made no sense. And in all the commotion, Jay escaped punishment for climbing on the roof, which annoyed Nick.

  “Cheer up, brother,” Jay had told him, grinning. “Mâmân is happy now.”

  WHEN THE GINGER tea on the stove came to a boil, Nick turned the heat down and got an old breakfast tray and set the box of Theraflu on it. After the tea had brewed, he poured it through a strainer into a mug, stirred in some honey, tasted it, and stirred in more honey. He carried the mug on the tray to the bedroom, tapped the door with his toe to give Annalise a heads-up, then used his forearm to push the lever down and open the door. Annalise was sitting up in bed, the lamp on the side table on. She was on Ellie’s side of the bed, closest to the bathroom. Nick walked over to the far side. “Here you go,” he said, placing the tray on top of the comforter.

  “Thanks,” Annalise said. “What’s in this?”

  “Ginger, honey, other things,” Nick said. “Old family recipe.”

  She eyed the mug. “No eye of newt or toe of frog?”

  “You know Macbeth?”

  “Read it last year in English.” She picked up the mug, sniffed it, took a tentative sip. She made a face.

  Nick smiled. “It’ll help with your throat. Settle your stomach too.”

  She looked doubtful but took another sip, then carefully put the mug down on the bedside table. “So, are you going to help me?”

  It was as if they were sailing on a lake and their boat had suddenly veered in a new direction. He went back around to her side of the bed and sat at the foot again. “Help you what?” he said.

  She stared at him. “With what happened to my parents.” She slid down in the bed a bit. Ellie would do that sometimes, act like a little kid and slide down under the covers, like she was hiding.

  Stop it, Nick thought. Gently, he said, “I want to ask you what happened. And then we can figure out what to do. Who to call.”

  Immediately Annalise sat up, shaking her head. “You can’t call the police,” she said.

  “If someone … did what you say they did, we have to.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head more insistently.

  “Why not?”

  “Because my father said not to,” she said. She was crying now, but she wiped the tears away with her wrists. “And because they’re going to think I did it.”

  He paused, like a man who had found himself stepping across a minefield. “Did what?”

  “Killed my parents! Jesus.” She was still crying, but she was also furious. “What do you not get? These men just showed up and killed my parents! I’m fucking freaking out here, okay? They came to my house and burned it down! And they’re probably looking for me! And I’ve been like a fugitive or something trying to find you, and I’m sick and I’m scared—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said as she started sobbing, and he reached out a hand and put it on the comforter where he thought her knee was. She hugged a pillow to her and sobbed into it, muffling her cries. He just sat there with her, his hand on her knee, while she cried.

  Presently she let go of the pillow and pushed it to the side. “Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I think I got snot all over your pillow.”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s okay. I can wash it.” He glanced at it, then looked back at Annalise. “Or throw it away. Might be best.”

  She stared at him. He smiled gently and pulled out a tissue from a box on the side table and handed it to her. She took it and blew her nose, then folded up the tissue into a tight square and dropped it into the trash can next to the bed. “Okay, so,” she said, her voice mostly recovered from crying.

  That was when Nick heard the distant drone of an engine. Someone was driving down the road to the cabin.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cole and his men were driving to the airport, not Tampa International but a smaller field closer to downtown, frequented by private planes, when Cole’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Except for Jonas, only clients called on this phone. Jonas and the others were following them in a second Suburban—maybe they needed something. But Cole’s gut and scalp tightened in anticipation. He knew it wasn’t Jonas. He slid the phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. Bingo.

  “Phone,” he called out. Waco, who was driving, immediately turned the radio off. In the back seat, Zhang opened a laptop. Cole’s phone continued to ring. He glanced over his shoulder at Zhang, who was typing.

  Without taking his eyes off his laptop screen, Zhang gave a single nod and said, “Go.”

  Cole held the phone up to his good ear and answered the call. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Cole,” the voice on the other end said, stirring the hairs on Cole’s neck. “This is Mr. Kobayashi.”

  “And I thought you were a telemarketer,” Cole said. “Maybe trying to sell me a condo in Jamaica.”

  “I take it yo
ur mission was not a success,” Kobayashi continued. He had the faintest Japanese accent, overlaid with clipped British tones. It was the voice, Cole thought, of a man questioning prisoners in a dungeon while a colleague heated up tongs.

  “We took Bashir and his wife,” Cole said.

  “But not his daughter,” Kobayashi said. “And not the information you were sent to retrieve. My employer is quite unhappy.”

  “As are we,” Cole said. “We are tracking the girl now. Anything her father told her will end with her.”

  “You sound certain for a man whose hands are empty.”

  Cole realized he was squeezing his cell phone and forced himself to relax his grip. “I am certain,” he said. “I know my men, none better. I suspect you know that as well.”

  “The skill of your men, Mr. Cole, is relevant only with regards to them obtaining the information you were hired to procure. If they cannot accomplish that task, they are worthless to my employer.”

  “We,” Cole said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Not they,” Cole said. “We. We will accomplish the task. The girl hasn’t gone far. As soon as we get in the air, we’ll be after her with multiple teams. I’ll keep you apprised.”

  There was a brief pause. “Very well,” Kobayashi replied. “Do you require any logistical help?”

  “Only if you can tell us whether or not the girl took a flight out of Atlanta in the past ten hours or so,” Cole said.

  There was another brief pause. “I shall get that information to you by morning,” Kobayashi said.

  Jesus, Cole thought. Who was this guy? He could get access to domestic flight manifests? “Understood,” he said. He glanced up at Zhang, who gestured at him to keep talking. “This information we’re looking for, you said it was in electronic form, on a flash drive,” he continued. “You sure there aren’t more copies?”

  “It cannot be copied or downloaded or even opened without the correct software,” Kobayashi said. “Seeing that I have already told you this before, I assume either your memory is slipping or you are keeping me on the phone while you try to trace this call. Probably Mr. Zhang is doing it. I believe he is the member of your group in charge of intelligence and surveillance. A hacker, yes?”

  Cole said nothing but glanced again at Zhang, who continued typing furiously on his laptop.

  “While I am certain that Mr. Zhang is more than competent in his craft,” Kobayashi continued, “he will not successfully trace this call, or any call I make to you. Focus your energy on finding Annalise Bashir, Mr. Cole.” There was a click, and Kobayashi was gone.

  Cole hung up. “Anything?” he asked Zhang.

  Zhang closed the lid of his laptop. “No,” he said. “It’s VoIP, but the IP keeps changing. It’s like he’s calling from eighteen different computers around the world. Call’s routed through Bahrain one minute, London the next. Layer that with encryption tech and it’s like trying to hack into an NSA mainframe.” He blew out a breath in frustration. “Sorry. It’s going to be impossible this way.”

  “I know,” Cole said. “We had to try.”

  Waco, keeping his eyes on the road, said, “Not to question you or anything, but why do we want to try and find out who this guy is? He’s paying us enough, right?”

  “Waco, shut the fuck up,” Zhang said.

  “Hey, shove it up—”

  “Enough,” Cole said, and the other men fell silent. “We’re doing it because I don’t like not knowing who’s pulling the strings. That’s why. Let’s just get to the plane and find the girl.” He sat back in his seat and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He didn’t like it. His squad had often not known exactly who the paying client was, although usually it wasn’t hard to guess. But this job was different all around. Who paid a thousand a day per person? For information retrieval? Cole didn’t really care what the information was or who needed it. He had long ago abandoned any moral qualms about his work, replacing them with a reputation for professionalism and a fierce loyalty to his men. And they were his men. All of them, even the ones they’d lost over the years—Deac, Rat, Mikey, and now Winslow. He carried them all with him, including the dead. And now this girl had escaped them. It was a problem. But they would do what Cole had told Kobayashi they would do.

  Soon the two Suburbans arrived at the airport, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence and lit by arc sodium lights that sat atop their posts like glaring moons. They drove through a gate in the fence directly onto the tarmac—no TSA check-in here—and pulled up next to a sleek Challenger jet that dwarfed the Suburbans. A man in a white short-sleeved button-down and a clipboard in his hand stood at the bottom of a flight of airstairs that led up to the plane’s cabin. Cole noted with pride that as soon as the first Surburban stopped, Jonas and Poncho exited their vehicle and moved to establish a perimeter.

  When Cole stepped out of his Suburban, the man with the clipboard stepped forward. “Mr. Simmons?” he said to Cole, using the alias he had been given. “I’m Randy, your pilot. We’re fueled up and ready to go when you are.”

  “Excellent,” Cole said. He looked at the length of the plane, then back to the man with the clipboard. He raised an eyebrow. “Nothing like riding in style, huh, Randy?”

  “No, sir.” Randy smiled briefly, then switched it off, all business. “Do you need any help with luggage?”

  “We’ve got it, thanks,” Cole said. As he spoke, his men pulled heavy cases out of the Suburbans and wheeled them over to the cargo door at the rear of the plane. “Wheels up in fifteen,” Cole said. Randy nodded and climbed the stairs.

  Cole walked up to Jonas and stood for a moment, both of them watching the men load the cargo efficiently. “Girl caught a plane to Atlanta,” he said. “At least according to the boyfriend. He held out a while before coughing that up, so I’m willing to bet it’s legit.”

  “He also said the girl had a stack of bills,” Jonas said. If she had paid cash for her plane ticket, that would mean no credit card payments to trace.

  “Kobayashi says he’ll find out if she took a flight out of Atlanta.”

  Jonas raised an eyebrow. “How the fuck can he do that?”

  Cole shrugged. “Said he’d let us know by morning.”

  Jonas said nothing after that. Cole knew the big man was thinking the same thing he was—who was Kobayashi, and what kind of influence did he have? “Zhang’s working on getting to the girl’s phone,” Cole added. “As long as she keeps her phone on, we’ll be able to track her.”

  Jonas looked skeptical. “My cousin has a twelve-year-old daughter, got her an iPhone for Christmas. She figured out how to turn off location tracking by New Year’s.”

  “Then Zhang’ll go through the girl’s carrier,” Cole said. “Anytime her phone pings a tower—she makes a call, checks her email—we’ll see where she is. He’s got Hicks checking her social media too. You never know.”

  Jonas shrugged. “So what’s the play? Zhang said the girl’s grandparents are in Hilton Head. We heading there?”

  “You are,” Cole said. “Take Hicks and Waco with you. The rest of us will stay in Atlanta, try to pick up her trail from there.”

  Jonas squinted at Cole. “You don’t think she went to Hilton Head.”

  “She told her boyfriend Atlanta.”

  “But you still want us to go to Hilton Head.”

  “Her grandparents are there. Gotta cover all the bases.” Cole stretched his arms over his head, winced.

  “Shoulder?” Jonas asked.

  “Fuck,” Cole said, disgusted. “I’m getting old.”

  “Better than the alternative.”

  That was true. But Cole hated the slow accumulation of aches and pains, like grit collecting in his joints. Of course, he’d also been stabbed in that particular shoulder a year ago, so there was that. “Just need a warm shower and some rack time,” he said. “Concentrate your energy and hoard your strength.” When Jonas looked blankly at him, Cole added, “Sun Tzu.”

  Jonas grunted. �
��Thought it was 2Pac.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What is it?” Annalise said.

  Nick held up a hand and half turned toward the bedroom door, his eyes unfocused as he listened. He felt Annalise tense on the bed—she’d heard it too. The whine of a car or truck in low gear as it came out of the trees and into the clearing at the front of the house.

  Nick stood and went to the door. “Stay here,” he said. “And be quiet.” He left the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He saw the machete in the foyer, leaning in a corner by the front door. That would do. Nick stepped to the front door and looked out the sidelight to see Deputy Sams getting out of his Explorer. The deputy clasped his hands as if absently rubbing his knuckles. When Sams looked up toward the house, Nick drew back from the sidelight so he wouldn’t be seen. He wasn’t sure why, and that bothered him. Ten minutes ago he had been thinking about when to call the sheriff, and now the deputy was conveniently outside his front door.

  Maybe it was too convenient.

  You can’t call the police, Annalise had said.

  She’s not lying, he could hear Ellie say as if she were standing next to him in the foyer.

  Nick opened the front door to find Sams on the top step, hand poised to knock. Sams took a half step back. “Jesus,” he said. “Sorry, Professor. Startled me.”

  “Deputy,” Nick said. “What brings you back?”

  Sams wrung his hands together briefly, then rested them on his belt buckle. “We got a call from the Tampa police,” he said. “They heard from the medical examiner’s office.”

  For a second, Nick looked blankly at the deputy. Then he understood—the autopsy of his brother and sister-in-law.