by Heskett, Jim
But he knew he couldn’t linger. He lifted the suitcase out of the trunk and stood over Vaughn for a few seconds until the man’s last breath eked out of his chapped lips.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
EMBER
Ember studied the beat-up brown Toyota sedan sitting on the top floor of this parking garage in downtown Denver. A wire clothes hanger stuck out of her back pocket. A chilly breeze whipped against her neck and face as she stood a hundred feet away, between a truck and a hybrid car. Her eyes flicked over the aging car, sitting all alone on the other side of the exposed garage.
There were a number of suspicious things about Niles’ car. First, since the last place he’d been seen alive was about a hundred miles from here, why was his car still in Denver? Had he taken a taxi or a Thum to Rocky Mountain National Park to hijack Ember’s contract? That didn’t make any sense.
Unless he had more than one vehicle. In that case, Ember had no idea what to do next.
Second, this Toyota had almost no snow on it. It had snowed an inch last night and other cars in the lot still had a dusting. If this car had been parked here since before then, it should have a layer of white leftover.
But the sun was shining now, so maybe the color of the car absorbed more heat and thus melted the snow faster? Ember didn’t know. That would have been the sort of thing she would have tasked Gabe with figuring out. That wasn’t an option now, or ever again.
She was on her own. The last few days had felt much like her early FBI time, chasing leads and squinting over evidence. Thinking on it brought a tint of melancholy to her face. Sometimes, she missed doing the real work of the FBI.
As to what Ember/Allison had been doing in Colorado since going dark—playing assassin—she would need to have a reckoning about that. And soon.
But Ember intended to push snooze on that bit of self-reflection for the time being. Because she remembered she actually wasn’t all alone and took her phone out to place a call.
“Hello?” said Isabel Yang after the second ring.
“You said it’s a brown Toyota sedan, right? About 1994 or so?”
“That’s right.”
“And Niles Thisdell has no other vehicles registered in his name?”
“No. We checked that. Why?”
“I’m standing on the top floor of a parking garage. I have eyes on the car, but something about it feels funny. Like I’m going to touch the door handle and get blown to pieces.”
Isabel made a hmm sound. “I can’t help you there. That sounds like the right car, though. I got the intel from Layne Parrish.”
“You did?”
“He’s in town and he’s offered to help. It wasn’t a hard sell to convince him. I like this Layne guy, to tell you the truth. He seems like an honest and decent person.”
Ember put her free hand on her hip. “Except for the lying-to-me-for-a-year part.”
“Technically, he didn’t lie. He just never told you who he was.”
She swished her lips back and forth for a few seconds, pondering the truth of the last statement. “I can’t argue with that, I guess. And it’s good to have him on the team, because I need all the help I can get. Beggars can’t be choosers. That’s what my dad used to say.”
“Is finding this car going to help you?”
“Sure, unless I get blown to bits. If that happens, you can have my framed Ansel Adams prints.”
“Uhh, no thank you.”
Ember cackled. “Fair enough. I know they’re tacky, but I couldn’t think of anything else to put on the walls of my condo.”
“Layne is trying to organize a meeting with Serena. He’s going to court her to our side. Someone like that could be a valuable asset. If it ends up true that Marcus is doing something shady, then he has a lot of weight behind him. We have to take great care how we approach that so we don’t all end up in handcuffs.”
Ember considered Isabel’s word choice: our side. It felt strange, coming from her mouth. But Ember supposed it was true now. The dynamic in their relationship had undergone multiple seismic shifts in a short amount of time.
Isabel cleared her throat. “There’s something else I thought you should know. Niles Thisdell, the man you said you accidentally killed in the park?”
“Yes?”
“I looked into him, and it turns out, your friend was mistaken. Niles never received any cancer diagnosis.”
This countered the information Fagan had told Ember a couple weeks ago at the Boulder Post Office. Fagan had an established network of spies in other Branches, and maybe they messed this one up? If the message had been incorrect or lost in translation, then that might change everything. But Ember wasn't sold. Fagan always had solid info.
“Interesting. Are you sure about that?”
“As sure as I can be. I suppose it’s possible he went to some back-alley doctor and those appointments never made it into a record somewhere. But Niles had health insurance, and he never reported a claim through them. He kept a handful of appointments with various doctors over the last few years, but no Oncologists. Nothing related to cancer at all.”
“I see. Thank you, Isabel. I appreciate the support.”
“Roger that,” Isabel said, and then she ended the call.
Ember approached the Toyota with careful steps, then rounded it. She eased down onto the ground and held her pocket mirror underneath the car, scooting it all the way around the underside. There was only one other person on this level of the parking garage at the moment, and that woman didn’t seem too bothered by anything Ember was doing.
Next, Ember lifted the hood—since this car model was old enough not to have a locked interior release—and checked it. As far as she could tell, nothing was wired to explode on ignition. That didn’t matter for her, anyway, since she wasn’t trying to steal the car, only break into it.
“Okay,” Ember muttered as she closed the hood and wiped her hands on her jeans, “I guess this is as good as it gets. Time to see if the car is all kaboom.”
She plucked the clothes hanger from her back pocket and wrestled with the wire for a few seconds to straighten it.
This would be an easy job. Pull the window away from the door, shove the hanger down through the top of the window, then wrap it around the door unlock knob. They didn’t make cars like this anymore, but Ember had lucked out today. Anything with electronics in it required a whole different set of tools.
She tossed a glance at the woman across the parking garage, arranging things in her trunk. Still no attention paid to Ember, just breaking into a car like it was her job.
Ten seconds after she’d started, Ember was inside the Toyota. Nothing had exploded yet.
She sat behind the wheel for a moment to catch her breath, then she scanned around the interior. There were no bombs here, nothing but a few plastic grocery store bags and receipts from Walgreens.
Ember popped the trunk and checked back there. A change of clothes, jumper cables, a couple of blankets. Also, a thing that looked like a paintball gun, a long tube-based rifle with a big container on top instead of a magazine below. Must have been in the trunk since the last Five Points paintball get-together in early October. Only days before Niles died.
No bombs, though. Not in the trunk, or under the seats, or hidden in the steering column—which is where Ember would have put them.
She had suspected this would be a wild goose chase, but she didn’t feel any better now that it was confirmed. She had no idea why, though. Was Bam trying to distract her from something? That didn’t seem like his style. No, he was lazy, but also somehow calculating and effective.
He had put that bomb above the strip club, and had told her about it, but had given her the wrong time to try to catch her off guard. So, he had given her information close to the truth. Maybe there was something in this car yet?
She didn’t think so. Sending her here was probably a task Bam had thought up at the last minute, something to keep her occupied while he waited to enact his next p
lan. Or maybe his final plan.
But where? Where would he put the bombs?
As she chewed on her lip and rubbed her hands together to keep warm, Ember had to simplify her deduction process. Bam was a deranged pothead, not a criminal mastermind. She had to think of the most obvious locations Bam had access to. The simple and easily apparent answer was usually the correct one.
Paintball.
Tomorrow, Five Points would get together to play paintball outside the little town of Hygiene. Could it be possible for Bam to be so brazen as to put the bombs there? Would he blow up his own Branch mates?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
EMBER
She opened the back door to the Boulder Post Office, a nondescript building in the eastern part of town. A place for members of the Boulder Branch of the Denver Assassins Club to meet and train and socialize. Over the last five weeks, every time Ember opened this door, she wondered if it would be her last.
Three years of her life she had been visiting this building, first as a recruit, then a trainee, then as a member. Now, as one of the more senior members here. It was a shame there was so much turnover, but three years is a long time in the life of a contract killer.
Of course, during those three years, she had also been an undercover FBI agent. The whole time, collecting data, feeding bits and pieces back to her handler in Washington, making notes for an eventual case against the DAC. No one in Boulder had any idea, and she’d wanted to keep it that way.
And then, something had changed. Ember grew to like the people in Boulder Branch. She learned that many of them were not bad people at all. Many of them only took on contracts that had a benefit for society. Adjusting to the idea of bad people also doing good took a while. It was hard to say when that exact moment happened—when she turned—but she could look at herself now and see a completely different woman than the one who’d arrived in Colorado three years ago.
Ember strolled down the halls of the first floor, smiling as she glimpsed a classroom where trainees were learning about the Review Board process. There was another curious contradiction… how Ember had so much respect for this process of law within the Club, even though it had wronged her. Even though it was wildly inconsistent. Even though she now knew that the DAC had outlawed black spot trials by combat, so the one they had given to her was “illegal” and unjust.
Still, she had respect and love for the Club and what it tried to accomplish. The idea of respecting an organization that managed contract killers was admittedly bonkers, but it made sense in Ember’s head. They weren’t creating assassins, they were organizing assassins. It seemed like an important distinction.
But she didn’t have as much respect and love as she used to. There was no doubt about that. Ember had a strong notion that if she went to David Wellner and petitioned him to lift her trial by combat on the basis of it now being illegal, he wouldn’t do it. That, despite all the rules and laws in place, the element of human fallibility still cast a shadow over everything.
Wellner wasn’t a bad man, but he was temperamental and mostly concerned with his image. Reversing a previous ruling was not good for the Club. That’s how he would justify it. The conversation wouldn’t go past his office door.
Of course, she could broadcast across the entire message board and expose the truth about the black spot, but what would that accomplish? Ember still had to find Bam and stop him from setting off more bombs. Everything else was secondary.
Ember stopped at the open door of a conference room, where her mentor Fagan sat alone at a table, notebook in front of her. Fagan was so old school, she did almost everything with real pen and paper. Ember rarely saw her use a cellphone, and only then to make phone calls.
“Hey, boss lady.”
“Afternoon.”
“Yes, it is.”
Fagan grinned, with the unburned half of her face still capable of grinning. “That joke never gets old to you, does it?”
“Never does. What are you working on?”
“Building chore assignments. We’ve had an influx of new recruits in the last two weeks, and someone has to make sure these children are taught respect for their working space. You probably haven’t even noticed, given how busy you are.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Fagan scowled. “It probably seems calloused to talk about new people and aluminum can smashing duty when your recruit was murdered less than a week ago. I’m sorry.”
She allowed herself a deep breath before speaking. “I appreciate that. And I understand, because the wheel of progress keeps on churning. I don’t take it personally. For the first couple days, I was a wreck. But I’m getting better every day, thinking about him less, keeping myself busy.”
“What have you learned while you’re keeping yourself busy?”
Ember entered the room and sat across from Fagan. “Here’s what I know so far: Brody 'Bam' Jenks claims he has five bombs. I found the first in Denver and neutralized it. The second went off before I could find it. He says he has three more, but so far, he hasn’t been willing to give me anything useful about where to look. I just came from visiting Niles' car, which was a dead-end.”
“We’ve had surveillance on Bam’s building all week. As far as we know, he hasn’t taken anything in or out of his apartment.”
“Right. I would suspect he’s keeping the materials close. I wanted to put a camera directly in his apartment, but he seems to be kind of a homebody, so I don’t know if I’ll get the chance. I already lost one in his pool.”
Fagan raised her lone eyebrow. “In the pool?”
“It’s a long story. And another thing, the Five Points monthly get-together is tomorrow, during the day. They’re going to play paintball at Ace, an outdoor facility in that weirdly named town Hygiene, twenty minutes north of here.”
Fagan dabbed leaky saliva from the corner of her mouth. “I know where Hygiene is. You think Bam will have the bombs there?”
“I do. I don’t know that he plans to blow up his Branch mates, but I think he’s smart enough to know that keeping the bombs close to him is his best chance to keep his property safe.”
“I can round up ten Boulder members and have them all available tomorrow.”
Ember considered this for a moment. She hadn’t forgotten the calamity of two weeks ago, when she had led a team into Quinn Voeller’s house, and casualties had resulted. “No. No assault. I go in alone. I’ll be small and quiet, no guns and no fanfare.”
“No gun? You mean you’re not going to carry a gun?”
Ember shook her head. “I’m not interested in starting a fight in front of an entire Branch that currently hates me. If I’m caught, I think I’d be better off unarmed, actually. But I won’t get caught. This is about stealth. While they’re all running around in the woods, shooting each other with paint pellets, I search Bam’s car, I search inside the paintball facility… they have to have lockers or a changing room or something. That’s my best bet. Alone, quiet, never letting anyone see me.”
Fagan knitted her brow for a few seconds. “Okay. But let’s go talk to Kevin. He used to be Five Points, so maybe he has insight about paintball that can help.”
Fagan stood, but Ember held up a hand. “Wait. There’s something else I need to tell you.”
“I’m listening,” Fagan said as she sat back down.
“Niles Thisdell did not have cancer. That inside info you got was incorrect.”
Fagan sighed, her eyes darting back and forth across Ember’s face. The old woman’s expression was often hard to read, but Fagan appeared to be surprised. “Are you sure? I heard different.”
“As sure as I can be. My source is reliable and has access to his health insurance records.”
Ember had to hope Fagan didn’t want to further probe into the source’s identity, since Ember had no safe way to tell her she was kinda sorta in regular contact with an FBI Agent.
“I feel like I should apologize,” Fagan said, seeming a little flustered. “I assu
med my information was good, but maybe I was too hasty to listen with a discerning ear. But if this is true, it does change things. If Niles didn’t have cancer, then was he not on a suicide mission when he came at you in Rocky Mountain National Park?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, after all the other nonsense is removed, it actually was just a clerical error that started all this. Maybe someone messed up and accidentally assigned the contract that night to two people, me and Niles. He died, the Board overreacted because of my history with Five Points, and now here we are.”
“Seems strange for it to be that simple. I mean, we have evidence Five Points is planning a civil war inside the Club.”
Ember shrugged. “I don’t know what to make of all that. These two things could be completely unrelated.”
“Let’s catch Kevin before he finishes his workout.”
Ember let Fagan lead her out of the conference room, down the hall to the gym. Inside, the stink of men and women exercising filled Ember’s nostrils. Metal clanging, people grunting, intense music playing from a set of speakers anchored to the corners of the room. A few people met her gaze and offered a hand for a wave, or a sympathetic smile of condolence, since they all knew about Gabe’s death and what she was going through.
Ember said a few hellos as she navigated through the people to a chiseled white guy near the back. He was wearing a weight vest and doing squats while balancing on an inflatable disc. With muscles from head to toe, he was quite a specimen. About five percent body fat, maybe four.
Fagan raised a hand at him, and then the guy stepped off the disc, huffing and puffing, red-faced. He nodded at the two approaching women as he sipped from a water bottle. “Fagan, Ember. Is this about your friend?”
“My what now?” Ember asked.
Fagan cleared her throat. “You asked me to have someone keep a quiet eye on your friend Zach. Kevin here has been doing that.”
“He’s taking a nap at the motel right now,” Kevin said. “I thought I would pop back to Boulder and get in a workout.”