Midnight Fever

by Lisa Marie Rice

  If Baker had had the fucking informant’s identity and his DNA, he’d have killed two birds with one stone. As it was, the informant would think Hammer had had a heart attack. You’d need medical training to understand the difference between a virulent H1N1 filling the lungs with fluid and a sudden heart attack or stroke.

  Dead was dead.

  Baker leaned over. Now. This was the part he’d watched ten times. He pressed a button and watched it again, in slow motion.

  A woman appeared at the end of the alleyway. The drone was right overhead, so all Baker saw was a large-brimmed straw hat and slender legs in turquoise pants. The drone hovered, and as the woman advanced, more of her became visible. Wisps of reddish-gold hair, a spectacular figure, flat heels, trailing a small rolling suitcase. When she was about halfway down the alley, Hammer straightened and watched as she approached.

  Baker had been surprised that it was a woman, though maybe he shouldn’t have been. Was she a colleague of Priyanka Anand, that bitch? Anand had worked in a lab with ten men and two women. Baker had checked everyone in the lab. Neither of the two women fit. One was close to retirement, almost sixty years old. This woman walked with the spring of someone young and fit. The other woman in Anand’s lab weighed 250 lbs. Definitely not this one.

  So, no. No one from Anand’s lab.

  The drone started its approach. It was a quadcopter, so the footage was slightly jerky. Hammer’s head suddenly rose, puzzled. The camera caught a perfect shot of his face, long, lined, frowning. It caught that moment when he realized it was a drone. It caught the moment when the viral spray was released. The spray caught the woman, too. Baker could see a high cheekbone, glistening.

  Hammer put his hand on the woman’s head, turning her away from the camera in the drone.

  The rest was so familiar that Baker could count the beats. Hammer coughing, hands at his throat, dropping to his knees, back against the building’s wall. The woman’s back and hat concealed most of their movements, though Baker knew exactly what was happening.

  Hammer was drowning in his own fluids.

  It always surprised Baker how fast it went. A minute, two at the most, was enough.

  Hammer’s heels drummed against the filthy asphalt, frantically, then slowly. Then a hand fell palm up against his thigh and the legs were still.

  It was over.

  He couldn’t tell whether anything was passed between them, but with Hammer’s death, the woman would have taken back whatever it was she’d been there to give Hammer. Undoubtedly a flash drive.

  She opened the door Hammer had unlocked and disappeared into the building, and was lost.

  The drone kept making huge circles around the building, but it was a department store. The woman could change clothes. He had no markers. She could be walking out right now in fact.

  The department store was connected via a sky bridge to another building of the complex containing menswear. Baker enlarged the radius of the drone’s flight. It made a circuit every half hour instead of every ten minutes, but at least he covered more ground. It still had another six hours’ flight time left, so he settled farther in the seat and watched the left-hand side of the screen carefully.

  Damn, a sunny day in Portland brought out the hordes. He carefully watched everyone who exited from the hotel and the conference center and the department store. Hundreds. Mainly men exited from the conference center and mainly women exited from the department store. He didn’t see anyone exiting that fit the profile he’d made of the woman.

  Though…hello. He sat up straight. The drone gave him a view of garage exits. Two of them. One from the underground hotel garage and one from the underground department store garage.

  His video program had an algorithm that caught repetitions, and it caught one now. Three identical SUVs, coming out of the department store garage at…Baker checked. Fifteen minute intervals, exactly.

  Hmm. The kind of thing the military did when the commanding officer ordered departures at specific intervals. To the second.

  He studied the video. The vehicles were exactly the same. Same color, same make, same model. The chances of three identical vehicles emerging at fifteen minute intervals exactly…hmm.

  He switched to a piggyback link to a Keyhole 15 satellite that would be overhead for the next couple of hours and set the algos to follow the vehicles.

  In the meantime, he ran the plates. All three were out of state, which was useful if you were hiding something. Local cops could only run in-state plates. But Baker could tap into a national database. It would take a while.

  The drone clocked seventy-four vehicles coming out in an hour. Almost two thousand vehicles in a twenty-four-hour period. Baker had a lot of crunching power but this would tax even his systems. He was going to run a plate search on every vehicle exiting the department store for the next six hours. He calculated that it would take something like twenty-four hours to tag each vehicle, run the plates and where possible follow the vehicles to their end destination.

  A lot of work. But that was what computers were for and his were the best.

  He was in deepest shit if the woman decided to stay in hiding until the department store closed. But that kind of patience was an operator’s patience, a sniper’s patience. Nothing about the way the woman moved down the alleyway made him think she was an operator. Chances were good she’d leave within the six-hour window.

  While his program ran the plate-matching program, his eye was caught by the left-hand side of the screen. The killing, running on a loop. The woman had walked down the alleyway carrying a roller suitcase but he hadn’t noticed that she didn’t have it when she rushed through the door into the back of the department store.

  He froze the video, peered closely. Zoomed in…there! Behind a Dumpster next to the door. It was the same color as the ground, but if he focused, he could see it was a handle. A suitcase handle.

  The woman’s suitcase had somehow been kicked behind the Dumpster and, in her agitation at Hammer’s death, she’d completely forgotten about it.

  Inside that suitcase would be details about the woman’s life, maybe a document, an ID. That woman had witnessed Mike Hammer’s death.

  Baker was pretty certain that he had a fail-safe method of killing, but no one had ever been present at the death before. He had no idea how perceptive she might be. If she was a friend of Mike Hammer’s, it was likely she was no dummy. And Hammer was meeting her for a reason.

  Chillingly, it was also possible she was from the CDC. In that case, Baker needed to find her as quickly as possible.

  Who was she? The answer might lie in that suitcase.

  Baker was a mile away. Traffic was light at this time; he could make it in about a quarter of an hour. He knew which cameras to avoid and the alleyway had no cameras. In and out, easy. The area held a conference center. A professional-looking man trailing a rolling suitcase behind him would be a normal sight. In half an hour, he could be back at his safe house, going through the contents of the suitcase. Figure out who she was, go to her house and grab some DNA. Have Frank mix up the cocktail.

  Spray her secretly. No witnesses. Watch from the drone’s eyes as she fell to the floor, choking to death on her own fluids.

  He reached out to start the engine when something on the right-hand side of the screen, from the drone video feed, attracted his attention.

  Four police vehicles, pulling up outside the narrow cross street that gave off onto Clement Street. There was no audio feed but he was sure they had sirens going. They definitely used their roof lights.

  A white van pulled up behind them. The CSU unit.

  Damn!

  Men and women piled out, walked briskly down the cross street then the alleyway, knowing exactly where to go. Baker watched them start stringing out the police tape, one tech kneeling by the body.

  Well, fuck. No question of grabbing that suitcase; it would be found immediately and entered as evidence. Baker was good, but breaking into a police evidence locker was
not something in his skill set. Nor should it be. He made his money by being smart. Breaking into a police station was lunacy.

  But would they then find out who the woman was and bring her in for questioning? Could they find her for him? Or was she the one who called it in?

  Baker waited, watching, directing the drone to fly far overhead in a pattern that kept the alleyway under direct observation. He watched the techs at work, watched as they loaded the body into a body bag and then onto a gurney that was pushed into the medical van.

  In the meantime, no slim woman in a turquoise pantsuit emerged from the department store. If she’d changed clothes, he was shit out of luck.

  Baker pulled out from his parking spot and headed toward the safe house, where another job awaited him and where he had further resources.

  There was a job to do in DC, which he could manage from here.

  If nothing happened in the next six hours, he would have to ask one of his tech people in Vladivostok to break into a Keyhole satellite after the drone had to leave and sift through petabytes of data. It would take at least another day to get the data, probably more. He commanded the drone to fly back to his HQ—an abandoned warehouse—when its energy started to run low.

  Whatever problem the SUVs represented, what was in the warehouse was the answer. A fixed-wing drone that carried explosives and two machine guns.

  Though Baker had never been Special Forces, he prescribed to the old SEAL motto that there were no problems that couldn’t be solved by bombing the shit out of them.

  Everything had happened so fast. Sneaking out of the hotel room, meeting with Mike, him collapsing to the ground, dead, the drone, Nick and his buddies to the rescue…

  She hadn’t had time to process everything in her head.

  When Nick drove the powerful vehicle up the ramp and out into the street, she could feel the pull of the engine like something powering up in her life, pulling her into a new train of events like a raging tide. She thought she’d be giving info to a crusading journalist who would change things, change her life, take her away from the world and plunge her into danger and isolation.

  Well, her life was changing, but in an entirely different way. She thought she’d have to step into a new life alone, shedding everyone. But no.

  One thing was very clear—she wasn’t facing this on her own. Nick had raced to her side and was staying there. And with Nick came the resources of a powerful company of powerful men and women.

  She wasn’t alone.

  Kay stared blindly out the window at the streets of Portland rushing by. Such a pretty city. She’d never had time to explore much of it the times she’d come to visit Felicity and Metal. Last night, knowing she had an appointment the next day with Mike Hammer, it had occurred to her that she might never see the city again. It had been entirely possible that she’d have to go into hiding forever. Either in the country or in some small, isolated community, keeping her head down for the rest of her life, or somewhere abroad.

  But here she was, in Portland, and not running away, not in the truest sense of the word.

  Her head disconnected and Kay simply watched the streets go by, unable to think, only to see. She saw modern buildings, a few mid-20th century buildings, small parks dotted throughout the city. Portlanders out and about, enjoying the cool, sunny day. An elderly couple sitting on a park bench, faces lifted into the sun, holding hands. A skinny girl with blond dreads, being pulled on a skateboard by an enthusiastic mixed-breed dog, tongue lolling as it ran along the sidewalk. A small café, patrons sitting at tables outside, small vases of daisies on each tabletop. A pretty girl reaching across a table to cup her hands around the head of a handsome boy and kiss him. A middle-aged couple looking on, smiling.

  Kay was running away from all of this, but not forever. She and Nick were regrouping, and they’d be back.

  No sounds came from the outside world, not even the sound of the vehicle’s engine. It was as if they were in a spaceship, shooting through time and space, alone in the universe. The windows could have been monitors.

  She turned her head to watch Nick. He drove like he did most things—well and intensely. For a second she flashed on how well and intensely he’d driven her last night. The sure feel of his hands on her, his mouth devouring hers, his penis inside her, thrusting like a piston. Heat bloomed in her core, a line of heat from her sex to her heart. The first time she’d felt like a human being, like a woman, since she’d gotten out of bed this morning.

  It was no time to be thinking of their night in bed together, but her body overwhelmed her. In some deep animal part of her, she realized that by some miracle, she wasn’t dead. Right now, she could be dead meat on the pavement of an alley, lost to life.

  But she wasn’t. She was alive and would stay that way. Nick’s grim face was testament to the fact that he was going to use every resource at his disposal to help her.

  She was going to live, in the open, as a free woman. They were going to beat this. Together. Her life had been handed back to her, richer than it had been before.

  She owed him so much, and she’d been such a coward, running away from him this morning. He deserved an explanation.

  “Nick,” she began, “I want you to know that—”

  “Not now, Kay.” He turned his head slightly to look at her, then turned back to the road. He was driving in hypervigilant mode, eyes on the road, flickering constantly

  to the internal and external rearview mirrors in regular rotations, occasionally checking the GPS monitor. They were not driving in a straight line. He would go for about five blocks, then double back for a block or two. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk when we get to the Grange.”

  The Grange. Felicity had mentioned this complex they were building in the wilderness. It was a business, a large server farm. Server farms had to be kept close to freezing. God, she hoped there were living quarters, and that they were heated. A shudder ran through her, the cold of delayed shock.

  “Reach behind you,” Nick said, eyes straight ahead. “There is usually a blanket on the back seat.”

  There was. Clean, thick and warm. She wrapped herself in it and felt immediately better. “Thanks. All of a sudden I felt cold.” She glanced outside the window at the bright sunshine. “Don’t know why.”

  “Adrenaline dump. Shock. You saw a man killed. Be enough to make anyone shocky.”

  Her seat was warming up, another layer of heat that she welcomed. Suddenly the back reclined and she glanced at Nick.

  “I’m taking a long, roundabout route to make sure we’re not being followed. You must be exhausted. You didn’t sleep much last night and you had these shocks this morning. See if you can nap. It would do you good.”

  He was treating her like she’d been in an accident and in a way, he wasn’t far off. But it felt wrong somehow to rest and sleep when he was vigilant. Plus, well…he hadn’t slept much last night either.

  A blast of heat that had nothing to do with the vehicle shot through her at the memory. Sleep had been impossible with Nick in her bed, in her.

  “I’m not really sleepy,” she protested, then gave a huge yawn.

  “Uh huh.” Nick’s face was utterly expressionless. “Just close your eyes, even if you can’t sleep. You’ll be under a lot of pressure once we’re at the Grange, and it won’t be anything I can help you with. So, rest while you can.”

  “Not sleepy,” she protested, but she closed her eyes anyway.

  And fell into a sleep so deep, it could have been a coma.

  Georgetown

  Washington, DC

  Senator Catherine De Haven, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sat at her desk in her townhouse in Georgetown, mulling over the previous day’s events. A long, long day that had tried everyone’s patience, a day in which she’d had to change her blouse twice. It had been like swimming in shark-infested waters but in the end, the biggest shark of all had been bloodied.

  A goodly chunk of taxpayer money was supposed to
have flowed into the hands of a powerful but unethical, perhaps even criminal, man. Those contracts were no more. She’d planned her revenge for years and now she had it. And it felt good, very good.

  The hearing was supposed to be a lovefest between the chairman and Stanley Offutt, CEO of Blackvale, a controversial security company. Besides the multimillion-dollar contracts for physical infrastructure, Blackvale was supposed to be given a contract for intelligence gathering worth billions.

  Instead, there had been a parade of witnesses testifying to cost overruns, to unpaid debts, to gross ineptitude. All of it orchestrated by Catherine. Yesterday had been day one. By the time the three-day parade of witnesses was over, Stanley Offutt’s reputation would be in tatters and no one would dream of offering him government security contract work ever again.

  Catherine couldn’t wait for Monday and Wednesday, day two and day three. She’d enjoy every single second of a process that wiped Stanley Offutt out.

  So. Several billion dollars’ worth of Blackvale contracts, gone.

  There was justice in the world, and Stanley Offutt was on his way to being a destroyed man, just as he had destroyed her husband, Nathan De Haven. Nathan had unofficially gone into business with Offutt ten years before and had lost everything. Nothing could convince Catherine that Nathan’s car plunging down a cliff side had been an accident, and not him taking his despair and bankruptcy off a cliff.

  It had taken her ten years of hard work to salvage the company while retaining her Senate seat. Ten years of waiting for an opportunity to destroy the man who had destroyed her family.

  Payback is a bitch, she thought, and smiled.

  It wasn’t supposed to be that way, she knew full well. No, when scheduled, the committee was supposed to reach a definitive finding whereby Stanley Offutt would leave the premises several billion dollars richer via a number of no-bid contracts. The chairman of the committee had gone to Annapolis with Offutt and was the type of politician who had never met a cost overrun by a corrupt contractor he didn’t like. Catherine would bet her children’s trust funds that some of that vast lake of money would stream right into the chairman’s Panamanian bank account.