by Abbott, Jeff
‘He was leveraging your kidnapping to bring you back to him.’
She nodded in shame. ‘It sounds horrible. But he wanted us back together.’ She glanced over her shoulder again. ‘I’m really not so special. I don’t know why he couldn’t let me go.’
Luke thought of her calm, her brave pleading with Eric not to leave Luke chained to the bed, her resourcefulness in the elevated train in fending off the mob. He knew exactly why Eric would not let a woman like her go easily.
‘How did you meet him?’
‘At his bank. I set up my company accounts there, he handled them.’
He remembered Aubrey’s export/import business now, from her friend’s blog.
‘I bought an import company a few months back. From a friend. Pottery from South America, African decor and jewelry, crafts and furniture from Mexico and eastern Europe, not expensive stuff. But you have to watch your expenditure, deal with making payments overseas, receiving payments from overseas, it’s a hassle. Eric helped me sort it all out. Then he asked me out to dinner … I thought he was a good guy. I don’t often choose well.’
‘Did he have a chance to win you back after he saved you?’
‘I don’t know. I was furious with him and grateful all at once. But once I saw the footage on TV - I recognized you - I knew he was involved in killing that man. To save me. It was going to bind me to him forever and I was very afraid. Whoever’s after him isn’t going to give up.’
They passed a nearly empty diner and she glanced at the menu in the window.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. He realized he was starving but suggesting dinner seemed bizarre.
‘We never got to eat our pizza.’ Aubrey rubbed her temples. ‘I’m horrible to even think of food right now.’ Her stomach growled.
‘It’s okay. We’re in survival mode.’
‘Weird. And everything else seems so ordinary.’ She crossed her arms. ‘We’re different, the world isn’t.’
She was right; warm light filled the diner and the few customers laughed over coffee and sandwiches and daily specials. They went inside, Luke’s skin prickling at the thought of sitting still in public. They took turns going to the bathroom and washing faces and hands and Luke thought she might bolt, but when he came back to the booth she sat waiting. They ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and hot coffee, which sent a welcome jolt of heat through their bodies. She stared at the mug. ‘I should be a mess. But it’s a luxury, isn’t it, to be a mess. In the worst of times you just have to forge ahead.’
She was right. They had to keep moving, and they had to find the money quickly. ‘The luxury we don’t have is time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘These people expect this money soon. It’s tied to a bigger attack - even bigger than the bombing in Texas. Mouser referred to it as Hellfire. We have to find out what it is, and I’m guessing from Mouser’s tone that the attack is very soon. Within a couple of days.’
Aubrey said nothing for thirty seconds, frowning in thought. She waited for the waitress to refill their coffees and to leave their corner. ‘It won’t take the police long to find Eric.’
‘No.’
‘And they’ll look for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘And whoever this Mouser man works for, they’ll be looking for me, too.’
‘Yes.’
‘If the police find me, then Mouser finds me.’
‘Well …’
‘They killed the power, Luke. They’re more capable than I ever imagined.’
He sipped coffee. ‘If you talk to the police, you can clear my name.’
‘What will clear your name is finding this money. Prove the motive Eric had to kidnap you. Then you give the money and all the information on the Night Road to the FBI.’
Give it all to the FBI. The fifty million. And his traitorous stepfather. He didn’t want Henry in jail. He realized, with shameful anger, that he wanted Henry dead for the hell he’d created for Luke. No. He put his face in his hands, let the wave of hate pass. ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re signing up for, Aubrey.’
‘I can’t tell the police anything more than I told you. I think we should stick together.’
The sense of responsibility weighed on him. He had barely survived his encounters with the Night Road; she had no idea of the brutality they would face. But he saw the resolution in her face and he decided not to argue with her. She wanted to hide, he didn’t blame her. She wanted to help him, for Eric’s sake. ‘So the two kidnapping victims are stuck with each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know how to fight, I don’t know how to run, but I’m not going to let these people get away with what they’ve done, to me or to Eric or to you.’
Her resolve strengthened him. ‘What I don’t understand is - why didn’t Eric just hide with the money? Why not go to Thailand, take the money, run with it?’ he asked.
‘He said tonight, that he had made a deal that would save us. Right before you got there. We were having a glass of wine to celebrate but he hadn’t told me the details yet.’
‘A deal.’
‘A deal where someone powerful would protect us - just like that Mouser man said before he shot Eric.’ She cleared her throat, rubbed at her eyes. ‘I was furious with Eric for getting me involved in this mess. I wanted out and he was trying to convince me I didn’t have a way out except through him.’
‘Who was going to protect him? Maybe they could protect us.’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But he called it a deal. He had to be giving something in exchange.’
‘The fifty million,’ Luke said.
He remembered the pages he’d pulled from Eric’s jacket when he’d gone for the gun. He removed the papers from his back pocket and smoothed them out on the table.
‘What is that?’ Aubrey asked.
‘Papers Eric had in his pocket.’ Each separate page was a printout confirming the opening of an account at a bank. The banks were scattered across America: Tennessee, New York, California, two in Texas, Minnesota, Washington state, Missouri. He didn’t recognize the bank names: they all appeared to be regional banks, not large chains. ‘These must be the accounts he set up for the Night Road.’
‘How would we check to see if they’re empty or not?’
He looked up at her. ‘You think he stashed the money in them?’
‘It would make sense. Maybe he opens the accounts, deposits the money, but he hasn’t given the account information yet to the Night Road. That way, he can still reach the money, even if they can’t.’
‘We can’t go to them; they’re all over the country,’ he said. ‘You have to have a password to access information online or over the phone.’
‘Then step one is finding where Eric hid those passwords,’ she said.
‘Might’ve just been in his head.’
‘That many accounts? No. He was the kind of guy who wrote everything down.’
Two policemen walked into the diner. The two officers gave the restaurant a cursory glance; Luke had his back to them. He sensed the momentary weight of their stare. Aubrey and Luke studied their coffee cups, waiting for the policemen to slide into a booth on the opposite side of the diner and to lose themselves in the study of the menu.
‘We need to go. Now,’ Luke said. Sweat coated his back.
He unfolded money for the bill and they got up and left. Aubrey leaned on him hard, rubbing his back, her pretended affection camouflage. He didn’t look like a cop killer on the solitary run. Luke was careful not to look toward the officers.
When they were out of the diner, she stepped away from him, crossing her arms. They walked for three blocks, found a bus stop, figured out the route to get back to Lincoln Park, where Aubrey’s car sat parked on a side street. The car was a late-model Volvo, and he checked its underside.
‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A gadget that could track you. Lik
e I’m going to recognize that.’ He risked a grin and she smiled, barely, back.
‘Or blow us up. Aren’t I Mary Sunshine?’ Exhaustion cramped her voice.
Luke slid out from under the car. ‘I don’t see anything there that looks totally foreign.’
‘All right.’ They got in; she drove into the dark street.
‘Where to?’
‘Some place we can plan. I need sleep.’ Luke’s fatigue was overwhelming. His body had no adrenaline left. He felt like he had been running forever.
‘Someplace cheap,’ she said.
‘Someplace cheap,’ he agreed.
‘Eric lied about his whole life,’ she said unexpectedly, and tears spilled from her eyes. But not sobs. The tears were steady and controlled and she wiped them off her cheek with the back of her hand. She kept driving and Luke didn’t know what to do until he put his hand over her hand on the steering wheel. Just for comfort.
Neither of them noticed the traffic camera perched on the closest intersection, watching them with its uncaring eye as they pulled away from the curb and drove into the darkness.
26
Snow slept in the motel bed, exhausted from her mending shoulder and her ill-advised murder. Mouser opened his laptop and took a walk along the Night Road.
He felt lonely much of the time but signing onto the Night Road’s private website was like slipping into a warm bath. Happiness, comfort, knowing you belonged. It was a rare sensation for him.
It was not a single website, but rather a fortress of several linked sites, hosted on a Russian server. The sites appeared innocuous - even boring - until you entered a password, and their delights opened up to your eyes. You could not get a password without being cleared by Henry Shawcross. Very few in the Night Road could name, by true identity, another member. He glanced at Snow; he still didn’t know her real name. It was better that way.
He sighed, with relief and pleasure. He read the fresh postings on the site - encoded in Night Road parlance. Celebrations and congratulations on the oil pipeline explosion in Canada. Disguising it as an accident, a Night Road member had managed to inflict millions in economic damage to both Canada and the United States for the tiny investment of five thousand dollars for plastique and transportation costs. Electronic versions of high fives floated in the postings. The E. coli meat poisoning scare from the Tennessee food plant was also mentioned as a triumph, the combined work of two members who hadn’t known each other before being introduced via the Night Road and had pooled resources and knowledge to infect the processing plant and send a wave of panic across American tables. Low cost, high impact.
A select few, proven the most capable, would take part in Hellfire.
He moved past the accolades. Someone in Alabama wanted training in explosives and wanted a new source for firearms. A man in Los Angeles was looking for other groups to network with to disrupt highway traffic on the 4th of July. Another poster in Belgium had lifted a large number of credit card account numbers from a US Army depot and was selling them.
Mouser paused at one posting - a British hacker had dispersed a Trojan horse via a porn site out of St Petersburg and the Trojan had begun a rapid propagation around the world; the hacker announced he was ensnaring a thousand unsuspecting PCs a day. The Trojan malware would serve up all passwords and credit card information stored on the infected computers. Blocks of one hundred systems were available for sale; bidding was intensifying.
Mouser considered. He’d funded his last three operations against the Beast - ammunition, travel and lodging - by buying a block of infected systems. It was like buying a mutual fund; some hijacked systems could deliver hugely profitable information; others - usually owned by teenage boys - would produce slim to none. But nice clean identity and account information was valuable - and, given how badly the past couple of days had gone, he and Snow might need clean names to step into, for a short while. Until the dust settled. And if the payments he’d been promised fell through, then he could use the financial info to resell down the chain. He knew of Serbian crime rings and one ever-desperate Muslim terror cell in France who would buy nearly anything.
Mouser put in a bid on two blocks of machines and then posted his own request.
Need access to Creeps full-blowns for P24. Only 2. 1 GPS.
In Night Road parlance, he was asking for access to all credit card databases for charges paid in the past twenty-four hours, for two names, and GPS information for one car - Aubrey’s. He waited.
Five minutes later, a voice elsewhere in the world replied:
Might can do. Offer?
Mouser responded: Can trade skills in US.
‘Skills’ was a code word for kills - he was offering to kill someone in exchange for the data he needed.
The reply: Not in US. Sorry. Good luck.
Then another offer appeared: I can help. Post details at [email protected]
This email address was an established blind - clicking on it took you to a legitimate computer website, a discussion group for American movies and TV shows owned by one of the same holding companies that owned Travport Air Cargo. The discussion group was in Malaysia, and the postings ranged from fluent English to Malay to badly broken English - perfect for shorthand cues. The site was again hosted out of Russia and when needed, postings by Night Road members were automatically purged from the system. It was not perfect anonymity but it was close.
He slipped into the forum, created a new user ID, and signed on. He posted a new topic, asking in broken English about an upcoming DVD release with the word skills in it. A moment later another poster responded with a long answer written in a motley, text-message style shorthand.
They chatted, continuing the camouflaged dance, until the respondent gave an encoded answer that contained a phone number with an area code in New Mexico.
Mouser called the number.
It was answered on the third ring. ‘I’m your new friend,’ Mouser said.
‘I can get your information.’ The voice was baritone, Spanish-flecked, tobacco-hoarse. ‘But it will take a few hours.’
‘I need it now.’
‘Your need is irrelevant. It will still take a few hours.’
Mouser sighed. ‘And you can guarantee continuous reading of the car’s location.’
‘Until my path into the database is discovered. No guarantees. But you should get a solid read on where your target is.’
‘Who do you want handled as payment?’
‘You take out a cop and we’re square.’
‘You mean just any cop at random?’
Mouser considered. Police officers were servants of the Beast. It was strangely thrilling to know a police officer was going about life, unaware that he or she would soon die so Mouser could buy information. ‘All right.’
‘What’s your car registrant’s name?’
‘Aubrey Perrault. She drives a Volvo, license plate F52-TJR, Illinois. Tonight she would have been parked in Lincoln Park, off Armitage.’
‘I have a friend who has a back door into most of the major metropolitan traffic camera feeds. I can see if she’s popped up anywhere in Chicago in the past few hours - it would help narrow the search - and contact you via the site.’ They would not use these phones again with each other; they were prepaids, to be destroyed and disposed of when their business concluded.
Mouser thanked him and clicked off the phone. He signed off the Malaysian site and returned to the Night Road site. So many people, each with their own agenda, their own skills, their own cause, trading their brilliance and their resources, ready to strike against the far wider world. An army, hidden in the shadows, and waging a war that would change the world. A Night Road, built by Henry Shawcross out of the bricks given to him by Luke Dantry. A scary, and a beautiful, creature, a beast of justice, was being born.
With Hellfire as its birth announcement.
Out of his window, Mouser looked up into the starry sky and wondered if he could see the GPS satellite far above, which w
ould tell his new buddy exactly where Aubrey and Luke were. He wanted to blow the distant eye a kiss.
27
Luke and Aubrey drove to a small chain motel on the outskirts of Chicago, on Interstate 55 toward St Louis, and checked in - one room, two beds. Aubrey paid cash; Eric had given her money that afternoon, since they couldn’t use credit cards.
Exhaustion threatened to swamp Luke’s brain but he sat on the bed and studied the list of states, banks and accounts. He didn’t know where to start. There were no names on the accounts, no passwords, no identifiers beyond Eric’s notes. Any other information he needed had died with Eric. And if these were the closed accounts - they were useless. Unless they could give him hints about which Night Road member each account was intended for. Presumably these people were scattered around the country, like Snow and Mouser. The bank with their Night Road funds would have to be close to them. It might help find them.
Aubrey showered behind the closed door and he kept his back to the bathroom. He lay down and fell asleep almost instantly. In his sleep he stood and he was back on his father’s flight. The man who had sabotaged the plane was gone, but he could see, from behind, his father’s body, slumped by a window.
Dad, he called. His father’s hand lay on the frosted window, the silver Saint Michael’s medal dangling between his fingertips.
He touched his father’s shoulder.
Turning, standing, the dead man was not Warren Dantry but Henry, his face blue, his lips gray, reaching for Luke’s throat.
Luke sat up, mouth dry, skin clammy with sweat. Aubrey, fully dressed again, hair wet, sat watching him from the other bed. She had turned on the television and as he looked at the screen he saw the pictures of the two men killed in the alley. Chris and the poor officer.
He reached for the remote, turned up the volume. No arrests in the double shooting. No suspects as of yet.
‘I’ll be back.’
He walked down four streets and at a busy intersection, found an ancient pay phone in front of a convenience store. But it was too close. He took a bus a few miles away, found another convenience store with a pay phone. He fed it quarters and dialed the police, said quickly and clearly, ‘I called in earlier the tip on the murdered officer. The two people responsible for shooting him may also have a connection to the train bombing in Texas, and they are working on a bigger attack called Hellfire, but I don’t know what it is.’ He hung up. He could have said something about Henry; he hadn’t. Why? He owed Henry no loyalty. But his mouth had not been able to form the words, to say what he believed about Henry as an absolute truth. He picked up the phone to dial it again, then slowly hung up.