Midnight Fire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “It corresponds to here.” A Google map came onscreen with a teardrop. “San Francisco. A tiny alleyway off Brannan Street. Not far from the big new Google headquarters.”

  Summer traced the teardrop. “Could that be it?” she wondered. “An attack on Google? God knows if we lose it, we’d be in a sad state.”

  Felicity cocked her head, considering. “No, it doesn’t compute. Because the building isn’t completed yet and it will be just an admin building. Google’s diffuse, it’s got server farms everywhere. Even blowing the Mission street building up wouldn’t take Google down. It would be a tragedy for the loss of life and there would be a huge loss of property but...it wouldn’t be a devastating blow.”

  “So...what?” Summer asked.

  Felicity just shrugged.

  “Well, we’re going down tomorrow morning, do some recon,” Metal said. “Nick’s alerting a few guys from the SF FBI office. We need intel. The special agents will have to stay on the perimeter until the Director gets warrants but we can get in close. You in, Joe? Jack?”

  Before they could answer, she got her voice in. “I’m coming too,” Summer said crisply. Determined. They weren’t going to leave her behind.

  “Sweetheart...” Jack said uneasily.

  “This story needs to be told. And it needs to be told right. There are a lot of different threads and I have no doubt that Springer and whoever else is working with him have a team that can obfuscate the truth. My job is to get to the bottom of this and explain it to people in a clear fashion. Get the truth in before their lies start. To do that, I need to be with you guys in San Francisco. I’ll stay out of your hair.”

  Metal had been talking off screen. “Nick says you can’t go near the infil team.”

  “The what?”

  “The team that will try to infiltrate the building,” Jack explained. He was still frowning.

  That made sense. “That’s fine. I’m not an operator. I’d just be in everyone’s way. But I want the right to debrief the team as soon as they come back.”

  “We’re booking rooms at the Marriott on 3rd Street, which is only a few blocks away and Summer can just stay in the hotel. Unless they’re planning to set off a nuke along the San Andreas Fault, she’ll be safe, Jack.”

  It was the exact wrong thing to say. Jack’s face showed extreme alarm.

  “That was a joke.” Summer put her hand on Jack’s arm and looked at Metal. “A very bad one, in extremely poor taste. Wasn’t it, Metal?”

  Metal’s mouth took on a mulish cast and then Felicity’s face appeared. “My guy sometimes suffers from foot in mouth disease. Pay him no mind. ASI’s jet will take off tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. from the general aviation section. Jacko will swing by at 8:15 and pick Jack, Summer and Joe up. You’ll find all the tac gear you need on the plane. Nick’s guys will be based in a suite at the Marriot from 7:00 a.m. on. They’ll text you their room number en route. You will have four connecting suites—Joe, Jacko and Jack and Summer and the FBI team. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day, so stop stuffing your faces—Isabel, I want boxed leftovers from tonight’s dinner, including dessert—and get some rest.”

  Isabel waved at Felicity. “You got it. Are you overnighting at ASI?”

  “Yeah. I’m doing all the hard work here, so I’ll need sustenance. You dig?”

  “I do. I’ll send Joe over right now with the leftovers and I’ll be over early tomorrow morning with some fresh croissants and a slice of your favorite cheesecake. If you ask nicely.”

  “Asking nicely.”

  “You got it. Thank you for this, Felicity.”

  She looked blank for a second. “Oh. Yeah. Ah.” Felicity blew out a breath. “Don’t thank me, it’s what I do.” Her head cocked again as she listened to something offscreen. “Nick says for everyone to get to bed and sleep comfortably for him. He’s catching the red eye and he’ll be in SF around dawn.”

  Isabel rose and shooed Summer and Jack from the table. “I can’t help you guys but I can certainly take care of cleaning up. Go to bed the two of you. You’re going to need to rest.” Isabel stood on tiptoe to kiss her brother goodnight. She whispered something in his ear and he nodded soberly. Then she hugged Summer tightly and whispered in her ear. “Take care of him, Summer. He’s been through so much. Take care of him, bring him back and think about staying here with us. Staying here and being a family.”

  Summer hid her face against Isabel’s neck and simply clung to her.

  Family.

  A powerful surge of emotions she had no idea how to handle pulsed through her.

  Family.

  Jack.

  Family.

  She stuffed all those emotions into a tight box and nailed the lid shut. She couldn’t deal with this, not now. They were in the middle of a national emergency. She’d elected herself a chronicler of historic events. Her writing would shape the way people looked and talked and understood what was happening. Maybe, with some luck, her writing would attain historic status.

  She couldn’t think about this, about Jack and Isabel and Portland and family, not in any way.

  But it was a long time before she could let Isabel go.

  * * *

  Jack was quiet as he opened the front door of Joe’s house and ushered Summer in. Isabel’s words had affected him deeply. Buying a house nearby, settling down here. Seeing Isabel and Joe nearly every day. Working at ASI with men he already considered friends and teammates.

  But the thing that made it gel in his mind was doing all this with Summer. Isabel had nailed it when she’d asked Summer to stay here, in Portland. Instinctively, Isabel had understood that Summer was the one for him.

  Isabel had always been smart when it came to the human heart.

  When he’d felt Summer inhabit a Summer-shaped space in him that he hadn’t known was there, he’d been right. Only that space was permanent.

  Jack had had a lot of women but he had never had this sense of partnership that he felt with Summer. Like they were a team, working toward the same goals.

  Right now that partnership was centered on unraveling a dangerous conspiracy, but he could feel that that partnership could extend to building a life together, a family together.

  A family.

  If he was ever to find a family, it could only be with the woman whose back he was touching.

  He hadn’t ever really thought about kids, but once the idea was put in his head he couldn’t dislodge it. Kids here, in Portland, with his sister and Joe and the other guys from ASI and their women. Kids who would have cousins nearby because Joe and Isabel were already talking about having children.

  Kids with a woman who was strong, with an iron moral core. A woman he desired more than his next breath, but also a woman he could count on, just as his mother had been.

  He didn’t need to accompany Summer over a threshold with a hand on her back. She was perfectly capable of that all on her own. She was an amazingly capable woman and didn’t need his help in anything.

  But he needed to be touching her right now, had to be touching her or nothing made sense in his life.

  Summer looked around with a sad smile on her face. “Isabel wants you to move here.”

  What the fuck was up with that sadness? Like he was going to leave her or something?

  “She wants you to move here, too.”

  The sad smile grew sadder. “That’s because she somehow thinks I would be an incentive for you to move here.”

  Fuck yeah, she’d be an incentive.

  Jack herded her into the bedroom. He wanted to talk to her but he also needed to touch her naked skin, he needed to be kissing her, he needed to be inside her, because that was where he found peace.

  “I wouldn’t think of moving here without you,” he said harshly and when she turned a surprised face t
o him, he kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  He walked her backward into Joe’s bedroom, half carrying her, half breathing for her. She’d gone to town with the clothes shopping. Everything he touched was either cashmere or silk, but it was the silk of her skin he was after.

  He undressed himself and then her, very slowly, his present to himself after these past six awful, lonely months. This was his prize.

  Slowly. He had to go slowly, because he’d behaved like a starved beast on the plane. Something about the disasters unfolding had been like a burr under the skin. Many were fakes but some were not. Even the fake disasters had shown him—as if he needed to learn that lesson—how fragile life was. You build and you build and then some cruel monster comes along and swats it all away with a careless hand.

  Look at his family. The most solid family in the world, they lived in a structure of love, unbreakable and untouchable and in the space of a few minutes, his family was gone.

  Bad things were coming and for some reason, Summer seemed to be in the crosshairs, too.

  He could lose her. He could hold her lifeless body in his arms and weep his rage to the sky and the sky wouldn’t care. She would still be gone.

  He had to bind her to him. He had to make sure she stayed with him, because he would keep her safe. He’d keep her safe because his own life depended on it.

  When she stood naked before him, looking up at him, he could see her heart in her eyes. She’d deny it, but he could see it. She was his. And he was hers.

  They belonged together. They would have a family together. After all that he’d seen, Jack ached to bring children into the world who would be loved as he and Isabel had been loved. Children who would grow up strong and fight the evil in the world.

  Jack reached out to touch Summer. He cupped her breast, warm and heavy in his hand. He turned his hand so his palm ran over her flat belly, where someday a child of theirs would grow.

  His cock swelled at the thought.

  Summer’s eyes grew round. “Wow. Whatever that thought was, hold it, because it worked.”

  He smiled. Oh, yeah.

  His hand lay over her womb as he bent to kiss her breast, the breast that would nurse their child. His dick jerked at the thought. His breathing sped up.

  Before he lost control again, he stood up, looking at her face.

  He’d watch that face age, he’d watch lines of good humor etch themselves into her skin. Lines fan out from those beautiful eyes. But he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she would always be beautiful to him, just as his mother had always been beautiful to his father.

  Words jostled in his throat. He had so many things to tell her, he had so many things he wanted to learn from her. But there was one thing above all he had to say. More important than anything else.

  He eased her on her back and took a moment to look at her. Her legs were slightly parted, a sign of welcome. He felt that welcome in every cell of her body. She opened everything to him. When her arms came up, he smiled and slid his body over hers, slid into her body, saw her close her eyes and smile.

  Her body was his.

  When he didn’t move, just stayed inside the warm clasp of her sex, she opened her eyes. “Jack?”

  He nodded, but made no move to start making love. Summer’s smile faded as she saw his serious expression. “Is something wrong?”

  He picked up her hand, looked at it for a long time then looked up at her face.

  “Summer Redding, will you marry me?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  San Francisco

  The Mission District

  Today was the day. Zhang Wei went over his checklist again, but it was a pure formality.

  There was already chaos in America. In all, over the course of the last twenty four hours, there had been fifty-seven perfectly plausible yet fake attacks that had flooded the airwaves and three real attacks, which Springer’s men had taken care of. The news organizations had still not separated the fake from the real.

  Springer had sent in encrypted data on the state of play of the US Government. The entire security apparatus of the United States was in full blown panic. All leave had been cancelled for all law enforcement agencies and every single police officer in the country was clocking in overtime. No excuses. The only police officers not on duty were in the hospital. The National Guard had been called out, quite uselessly, in all fifty states. Every resource FEMA had was in the field. Homeland Security was in a state of high alert.

  Every single news channel was in disarray. There weren’t enough reporters in the world to cover the fake attacks, some of which had been planned for remote, hard-to-access areas. The Fontana Dam, for example, was hundreds of miles from the nearest big city. Helicopters had overflown the area for hours, looking in vain for the bombed dam. By the time they got the news that the dam bombing was a fake, the airwaves had been filled with the other attacks.

  Zhang Wei followed all the news networks on his monitors but he was also following Twitter feeds and news blogs. The more intelligent bloggers were speculating that yesterday was one huge hack but Zhang had several more fake attacks and one real one planned—a bomb that was going to go off in the Port of Savannah at 3:00 p.m.

  An atmosphere of havoc and disorientation ruled, and emergency services and law enforcement services were being chewed up. By tonight, police officers, hospital staff, medics, members of the National Guard would have been on continuous duty for twenty-four hours. Exhausted and disoriented, they would be unable to face a complete blackout in six western states.

  A blackout that would be real, and would last forever. Or until China released the generator spare parts.

  When the electricity came back on, there would be no doubt who had turned it back on. The PRC, which had been supplying water and food and medicine for the previous six months.

  The blackout was planned for 5:00 p.m. today. An hour before sunset, preceded by massive cellphone jamming all along the West Coast. Then the lights would go out. By dawn it would be clear this was no rolling brownout. Electricity companies would have to start telling the truth. The generators were broken. There were no spare parts. They would stay broken until the spare parts could arrive.

  When would that be? There was no answer to that. The Politburo had quietly bought all the companies that manufactured spare parts. They would arrive when China said they could arrive.

  When asked when the lights would go back on, the electricity companies would give a huge shrug. Because the answer was—we have no idea. And frantic orders would be sent out, except computers and cells wouldn’t be working to place the orders. Everyone would go back to the use of landlines, which would work—for a few days.

  Landline phone power came from telephone companies, from internal generators that feed into a battery bank. But the battery banks would fail in a few days.

  And in a few days, the entire West would be in complete upheaval. Zhang Wei smiled as he thought of eight million Angelenos trying to escape via the freeways. The freeways would become ribbons of metal as passengers deserted their vehicles and set out on foot. Travelling by day because there was no light by night. Not even the light of the moon. Today was the new moon.

  Grocery stores would receive no supplies, freezer contents would melt, hospital generators would run down, water pumping stations would stop working and whatever trickled out of faucets would be gravity-driven from cisterns and untreated.

  Anyone dependent on insulin, blood pressure medication, anti-depressants, anyone who had infections and needed antibiotics—they would be out of luck.

  Whoever survived the first week of panic and violence, would start dropping dead. Third world diseases like cholera, typhoid, diphtheria would quickly make a comeback.

  He and his men, on the other hand, wo
uld be safely closed up in this building, snipers on the roof with suppressed rifles protecting them if anyone thought to break into an abandoned-looking building. They would have ample electricity, food and water. All they had to do was stay hidden until the PLAN arrived.

  And the PRC would emerge victorious, having defeated the strongest nation on earth, without firing a shot.

  All of this would begin at 5:00 p.m. when Zhang Wei pressed “enter.”

  * * *

  “Stay here,” Jack said anxiously. For about the billionth time.

  It was only because Summer could clearly see how frightened he was for her that she didn’t roll her eyes. There was an entire team marshaling in the living room of their suite. The ASI men—Jack, Jacko, Joe—and three FBI special agents from the San Francisco Office. They hadn’t been fully briefed but yesterday’s fake attacks, which were still ongoing, had them spooked. All they knew was that maybe the people who were behind the attacks were in an alleyway off Brennan Street in the Mission.

  Jack had been fine discussing tactics with the ASI guys and the FBI special agents, cool and calm. They stood around a big tablet in their bulletproof vests, going over a surveillance plan and Jack was good. And then his eyes showed the whites all around when it came to her.

  “Jack,” Summer said patiently, hand on his arm. He was so stiff his muscles practically hummed. “I know the drill. As I’ve said time and again, I am not an operator. I know I’m not an operator and I have no desire to be one. My role here is to gather intelligence, put together the facts. Which I can do from the comfort of my hotel room.” She swept her arm to indicate the amazingly lush suite. “So, in essence, while you and your teammates go out in the pouring rain and freezing cold to examine what’s probably an empty building, I’ll stay here in the comfort of this room, going through the contents of Hector’s laptop and ordering room service. Did I make an adequate summary of the situation?”

  But irony bounced right off Jack and everyone else on the team had had a humorectomy.

  He stood a moment, staring at her, breathing heavily, like a bull.