by Heskett, Jim
Bam turned off on St Vrain Road, toward the tiny little town of Hygiene. Ember slowed and let him gain some distance before she took the same exit on the highway. There wasn’t much traffic to speak of, so she couldn’t afford to follow him too closely. He turned north on 75th street, into a densely wooded area, then into a property with a large metal arch, like a ranch. Ember couldn’t read the words until she had turned on 75th. As soon as she saw it, she realized she should have figured this out days ago. Above, a giant sign read:
ACE PAINTBALL COLORADO: THE LARGEST OUTDOOR FACILITY IN THE WORLD!
Ember slowed and parked next to the entrance arch. Of course. Each Branch in the DAC had a regular monthly meetup for all available members. For Boulder, it was brunch. For Five Points, they liked to come out into the woods and play paintball. They had been observing this tradition for at least a dozen years, according to Club lore.
Ember watched Bam park in front of the office building, then he exited his car and marched inside. As always, he wore that inexplicable blank look on his face. Was he not capable of making regular human expressions? She’d seen him chuckle and frown and grit his teeth, but he always looked so hollow when emoting. Like an android almost capable of replicating human feelings.
She took stock of the area as she slipped out of the car. There were a few outdoor arenas, each about the size of a football field, with obstacles and platforms. All of them drenched in splotches of various colors of paint. Lime green, hot pink, aqua blue. It looked like the set of a 1980s kids TV show out here.
There was also a path leading to a land beyond, a forested section with fencing around it. That area looked huge, probably dozens of acres. All one giant paintball arena? If so, that was the most likely place Five Points would play. They would want a big area to themselves and probably rent out the whole shebang for the day.
Ember lowered her head and jogged over toward an information board about the facility. It explained the fees for various outings, group rates, the facilities available. She learned that the large wooded area was forty acres of open space with “natural obstacles” for “a truly free” paintball experience. Bingo.
Also, there was a note about the facility being closed to walk-ins due to a reservation. Just as she had suspected, that had to be for Five Points, and the date was for two days from now. Bam was here now, apparently preparing to hone his skills for the battle royale later that week. Either that, or putting a deposit down.
Two days. Ember had that—or less—to find the bombs.
Chapter Eighteen
ZACH
The college student sighed as he eyed the front of his apartment building. He had looked at every car in the parking lot. Not a single car had any suspicious occupants. There was no one sitting on nearby benches, peeping over the top of a newspaper. Not a soul making laps on the sidewalks, pretending not to look at the apartment building but actually looking at the apartment building.
Zach had to acknowledge that he’d received all of his spy training from movies, but his conclusions seemed logical. There were no cameras in the trees that he could see, no drones flying above. No snipers on top of the gas station across the street. This was about as clear as it would get, he figured.
After yet another circle around the exterior of the building, he deemed this trip home safe. He needed his laptop. There were homework assignments and other bits of research that weren’t available on the cloud, locked away in that slim hunk of aluminum on his coffee table. The computer called to him like a beacon.
Ember would say to leave it. She would say it wasn’t important. While he knew she was doing these things to protect him, Zach couldn’t let go of the consequences. She wasn’t the one who would flunk out of at least two classes this semester for missing assignments that constituted huge chunks of his final grade. She wasn’t the one who had to jeopardize financial aid and her entire academic future.
“Screw it,” Zach said, then he took his keys out of his pocket as he crossed into the lot and up the exterior stairs to his floor. Heart churning, mouth dry, vision a little blurry at the edges. He drummed the beat to an old song on his thighs as he moved, to give his nervous hands something to do.
Sunny and cold this morning. He winced against the light. Maybe he could grab his sunglasses while he was home, too.
On his floor, he went into hyper-awareness mode. The hallway in front of him seemed like a tunnel, disappearing into infinity, like pointing two mirrors at each other. The door to his apartment seemed miles away.
“Settle down, Zach,” he muttered to himself. “You’ve done this a thousand times.”
But never once after having to flee his apartment in fear for his life.
He entered the apartment and found it exactly as he had left it. He had been expecting maybe to find all of his drawers open, his belongings all over the floor. But it seemed like no one had been here. If someone had rummaged through his apartment looking for… whatever, that person or persons had been orderly.
His eyes did drop down to an envelope on the floor, slipped underneath the door since he had last been here. It was addressed to “Zach + Alec,” the former roommate who had moved out quite suddenly after—Zach assumed—an unpleasant meeting with Firedrake about what he knew or didn’t know. Zach opened the envelope to find a letter from the landlord.
Z+A-
Come see me IMMEDIATELY. Rent is overdue. Pay it TODAY or I will have to take action.
Nothing signed at the bottom. It didn’t need a signature. The lack of one at the bottom helped to drive home how serious the landlord was about the tardy rent. Zach didn’t know what to do about it. As far as he could see, this might be the last time he ever visited this apartment.
He sighed as he dropped the envelope back on the floor and spotted his laptop, sitting on the coffee table, just as it had been a week and a half ago when he had sat here with Ember and she had persuaded him to go on the run. He liked to think it was sitting in the same spot, at the same angle, but he couldn't expect to remember something as specific as that.
Zach sat and lifted the lid. First, he opened the computer settings and disabled location self-tracking functions. He didn’t have any evidence Firedrake had been in here, but he couldn’t take the chance that they might have tampered with his laptop.
But Zach wasn’t a computer expert, so would he be able to tell the difference if they had?
He picked the slim machine up. Holding it close to his face, he turned it over and over, examining every angle. It hadn’t been interfered with, based on a lackluster visual inspection. Maybe they had plugged in a flash drive and installed software to track what he visited on the internet or files he accessed, but why? Thomas had already given Zach the ultimatum about the job yesterday outside his advisor’s office. What could they possibly gain by tracking his online movements now?
Once he was satisfied—or as satisfied as he knew he would get—he opened his files to make sure his homework drafts were still there. An involuntary sigh of relief escaped his lips when everything looked in place. He was behind on his research, sure, but now he didn’t have to start at zero.
Then footsteps sounded outside his door. Zach froze, his eyes darting around the room, looking for a weapon. Where was his baseball bat? Back in his room? If that door burst open right now, he had no idea what he would do. Run into the kitchen and grab a knife from the drawer?
The footsteps continued on, and he now heard a woman’s voice. A few seconds later, the footsteps faded, and the hall outside again turned silent. He continued to stare at the door, quiet and still, waiting for something to happen.
Zach let out a breath, his shoulders slumping, an ache already in his neck from tensing his muscles. He felt lightheaded from the last ten seconds. Eventually, he returned to normal—or, as normal as he could be, given the nature of his task.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He knew what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t seem to make his brain connect to his hands.
; Eventually, Zach opened a browser window and typed Ember Clarke into a search engine. All the results below related to a fireplace soot cleaner named Ember Clerk. Same on the second page. So, he tried typing in her name with quotes around it, and it came back with no results.
Very odd. No social media, nothing about employment history, no old high school sporting events mentioned in the local or state news. Hadn’t she said she used to run track in school in San Diego? He couldn’t remember now.
He entertained the idea of closing the laptop and leaving, to drive back to the hotel and continue the search from the relative safety of the business office there.
But he had to know. Now. There was one news mention he had definitely expected to find something about: Ember’s little brother. According to her, about ten or eleven years ago, her brother had been gunned down in a drive-by near the La Jolla neighborhood, as a result of a mistaken identity.
After five fruitless minutes of hunting around on the internet, Zach finally found it. La Jolla was a low-crime area, and he didn’t have to dig through too many police reports to find something that matched the time frame and age of the victim.
A young man named Murphy Campbell, aged 15, had been killed by three gang bangers in a Jeep. Murphy was survived by an older sister, Allison, and his parents Heidi and Paul Campbell, of San Diego. The year of the shooting seemed to match up, as did the age of the older sister. But it wasn’t Ember Clarke mentioned in the story.
Allison Campbell.
Zach spent a few minutes searching that name, and he experienced a difficult time sourcing data on this Allison person. No social media accounts for Allison Campbell, either. Staying off social media wasn’t unheard of, but it was odd, for sure. She seemed as invisible as Ember.
But then, he found something interesting.
Fourteen years ago, a picture of Allison Campbell in the University City High School production of West Side Story. Allison had been cast in the role of Maria. There were four pictures of Allison from the final dress rehearsal, in full costume and makeup.
Zach picked up his laptop to hold it closer to his face. The pictures were grainy, small, low resolution, black and white. The teenaged girl in the pictures was wearing a curly black wig and had a beauty mark on her cheek that looked like a black dot from a marker. With all the stage makeup, it was hard to say for sure who the person in this picture was.
It could be her, though. The age and location matched up. But Zach couldn’t tell with any certainty.
“Is that you, Ember?” he asked the laptop screen.
Chapter Nineteen
EMBER
Ember opened the door to the indoor shooting range in Broomfield, cleverly named Indoor Shooting Range. Unlike the shooting range across the street from Pink Door, this place was quite large.
She shoved her phone in her pocket after checking a message from Zach that he was alive and well and whatever “stupid thing” he’d planned to do hadn’t ended with any negative repercussions. That was a weight off Ember’s mind, for sure.
She paid the fees at the front and entered through a black door to the inner area, past the wall plastered with guns hanging on racks. She could hear the muted pops of pistols beyond the wall behind the reception desk.
After a brief conversation with the tattooed woman at the counter, Ember made her way to the actual range. Inside, she slid on her ear protection, as Fagan was going to town on a paper target with a 9mm pistol, blasting holes in whatever demons currently plagued the woman. It would have been a much easier activity to manage if the Club allowed for Post Offices to have shooting ranges inside their buildings, but it conflicted with that whole “no weapons on the premises” rule.
And Fagan had said she didn’t like shooting in Boulder, so she would drive about ten miles away to Broomfield. Not far from here was the abandoned Night Owl bar, where Ember had discovered Quinn Voeller’s first victim, more than two weeks ago. She didn’t like to dwell on that particular failure, if possible.
Fagan stood, the un-mutilated half of her mouth pulled into a frown of intensity as she unloaded a magazine at the target. From her angle, Ember couldn’t see the target, but she knew from experience Fagan was a crack shot, and she didn’t waste rounds.
Ember nodded at the range officer, standing at the rear of the room, hands behind his back. Then she sidled up to Fagan, who immediately lowered her weapon and placed it on the table in front of her. Her shoulders were pumping up and down, breaths pushing in and out.
“You okay?” Ember asked.
“Just managing some aggression.”
“Is it working?”
Fagan shrugged. “There aren’t many things in the world more satisfying than pulling a trigger and feeling the sheer, raw power from the other end. It’s my therapy.”
“Sure, I can buy that.”
Fagan focused her good eye on Ember. “You?”
“I’m okay. Trying not to think about… you know.” Since they weren’t alone in the room, Ember didn’t want to say Gabe’s name. “You almost done here?”
“I can be, no problem,” Fagan said as she ejected the magazine from her Beretta, removed the round in the chamber and then gathered up what remained of her box of ammunition.
They left the room and stopped at the washing station to scrub their hands and arms. Ember hadn’t strictly needed to, but she did anyway. Fagan returned the Beretta at the counter and then took her ID back.
She tilted her head toward the front. It was a nice day outside, sunny and cold, with much of the blizzard snow turned to mush, soon to be water soaking into the earth.
Ember stepped outside and unconsciously checked the area, fully out of habit. They were next to a side street in an industrial area, with scrapyards and machine tool shops and a handful of auto parts stores. Ember checked the tops of the nearby buildings for snipers and the nearby cars for any suspicious occupants. No sign of Bam or anyone who looked like Five Points. No sign of this Serena Rojas woman, the other person actively trying to kill Ember.
Ember wished she could confide in Fagan about that particular complication in her life, but there was no way. That would require Ember explaining why a government operative was on her tail, hired by someone at the FBI. And since Ember had never told Fagan about her clandestine life as an active FBI agent, it would be impossible.
So, Serena would stay a secret.
Fagan grunted as she sat down on a bench near the parking lot. Ember joined her. They both stared out over the train tracks crossing the nearby street.
“It’s weird to sit down with you, but without tea,” Ember said.
“I could have brought a thermos, if I knew you were coming.”
“Anything with those notebooks I left you?”
“Yes,” Fagan said. “Niles Thisdell was a grade-A oddball. That has been the main takeaway by studying hundreds of pages of his ranting and rambling.”
“Discovering his weirdness didn’t take much investigative work, I bet.”
“No. And he may have been a lunatic, but he wasn’t dumb. I felt a real Unabomber vibe from him, just by reading it. Even in his journals, he was careful about what he wrote. He used shorthand, abbreviations, and lots of code words. But there’s no cipher in those notebooks. He must have kept it somewhere else.”
Ember sighed. “Anything useful you could glean from it without a cipher?”
“Five Points doesn’t seem to like Westminster Branch too much, but we knew that already. Five Points has long had a history of antagonism and minor squashed rebellions. Also, he made lots of notes about Bam’s progress as his recruit.”
“Oh yeah? What did you learn?”
“Niles considered Bam to be capable, dangerous, and highly volatile. And smart. Unreliable, unpredictable, and physically freakish. He expected Bam to be the sort of assassin who excelled at using only his hands as weapons.”
Ember nodded. “I can verify some of that. Looks like his intelligence level depends on how much weed he’s smoke
d on any given day, though. I dropped a bug on him and followed him around this morning. He eventually found it. The bug died an hour ago, so that road has ended, and I don’t think I’ll get a chance like that again. I need something better. I need an upgrade.”
Fagan frowned. Up until a few days ago, this would have been a task Ember assigned to Gabe, her resident tech expert. Ember could read this same thought on Fagan’s face. The older woman opened her mouth, but didn’t seem to have anything to add, so she made a hmm sound instead. “I don’t think we have anything like that in the Branch supply room.”
“It’s okay,” Ember said. “I’ll go see Jack. He’s expecting me later.”
“Good, good. Tell him I said hi.”
Ember felt her pulse rise and heat flush her cheeks as she prepared herself to say what she came here to say. “I need to ask you for a favor.”
Fagan, staring out over the mountains to the west, nodded. The train crossing sign lit up as the wooden arms came down. The tracks rumbled, and a train approached, headlight blaring.
“I have this friend named Zach. We’re dating, actually.”
Fagan’s expression didn’t change. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you smile every time you say his name, ever since you started talking about him the other day.”
Ember chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I didn’t know I did that. Sorry. I thought I stopped giggling over boys when I was a teenager.”
“I’m a little surprised you have a boyfriend, to be honest.”
“Well, I didn’t go out and acquire one on purpose. It kind of snuck up on me while I had other plans.”
Fagan’s frown stayed in place, and Ember could tell she wanted to add a comment, but the older mentor held her tongue. “What’s the favor?”