by Bower Lewis
She stared at the display as the lights began to dim. The message was an address. John spoke again as he took the phone from her hand. His voice sounded distant.
“He’s asked me to request that you to be more careful with this one. And to keep it out of the sink, if you can.”
CHAPTER TEN
Patience opened her eyes to find her uncle grinning down at her. Zane was on his knees beside him, holding something cool to her forehead. He most certainly wasn’t grinning.
“What happened?”
Her tongue felt heavy and uncooperative, and her skin was hot and wet. Her head pounded like John’s boots against the door.
“You went down, kid.” He winked. “You went down hard.”
She pushed Zane’s hand back and sat up, fighting the blotches in her vision and the sick, uneven feeling that was the last thing she remembered before everything went away. She tried to stand up, but Zane laid a hand on her shoulder.
“You need to take a minute, Patience. Come on.”
She pushed him away again. “I can’t take a minute, Zane. We have to get out of here. Once the police show up, we’re done. Get your things.”
“Joey and Alex aren’t going to the police.”
She just stared at him for a moment. “What are you talking about? We’ve just abducted an elected official, insulted his intelligence and his hair, and duct taped him into a beaten-up piece of furniture. You don’t think they’ll let that all slide just because you’re an Ellison, do you?”
“They definitely will not, but they’re not going to the police.”
John raised an eyebrow at him over Patience’s head. “Okay,” he said, as they helped her to her feet. “It sounds like you two had better fill me in on the mission, so we can be on our way.”
She took the cloth from Zane’s hand and pressed it against her throbbing forehead. “So, all this time you’ve been a…whatever the hell it is we are? You’re not sick?”
John laughed.
“Hell no, I’m not sick, Pax. Never have been. I’m a SCUD—a Special Commando Under David—and I was redeployed to Boston just this morning by the Good Lord God, Himself. So, catch me up on the job, would’ja, kid? Time’s a wasting.”
• • •
Patience frowned as her uncle scrolled through the few select messages The Biz chose to set the scene for him. “He just speaks to you directly?” she said. “Like an adult, with no text speak or emoticons?”
John glanced up with a smile. “I don’t even have a mobile phone. By the sound of it, I’d say this is His special thing with you.”
“That’s just super.”
“Cherish it.”
She raised a hand to her aching brow. “Special Commando Under David,” she repeated. “Uncle John, are you suggesting that the Supreme Being is a Judeo-Christian God?”
He stopped scrolling and looked back. “Well, of course He is—to the Jews and the Christians. He’s got SCUDs of every religion, though, and they’re all called by names that make sense to them. Sometimes He’s One; sometimes He’s Many. Oftentimes, He’s She. It’s nothing to get your head too muddled up about, though, and it’s not what’s important now.” He handed Zane the phone and brushed off his fatigues. “I’ve seen enough. What makes you so sure this Rockwell corpse hasn’t dragged his boy off to the cops?”
Zane glanced at Patience before turning back to her uncle. “Because going to the cops ensures that they’ll never get what they want most in the world and not going to them pretty much guarantees that they will. We need to stop Joey and Alex before they get to Hyannis. Nothing else matters now.”
“What’s in Hyannis?”
He shrugged, but failed at looking casual. “My father.”
Patience looked up again. He declined to meet her eye.
“Is that honestly what you believe will prevent them from turning us in, Zane? You think they’d rather tell on you?”
“In a manner of speaking. My father’s support for Joey’s candidacy would open some pretty tightly closed doors once they get to Washington. More importantly, SolarTech’s entire financial infrastructure has been built upon loans and lines of credit from Ellison Bank and Trust. If they’re about to become publicly aligned with the senator, you can bet that Joey and Alex want his support now more than ever. They want it because SolarTech wants it. They need it because SolarTech wants it. My father would never touch a candidate who’s in bed with a company that owes his company billions. The bill amendment alone would force him to keep his distance, so if they want him, they’d better get him now. They’re taking it to a slightly higher level, but this isn’t an uncommon dynamic in Rutherford’s life.”
“I don’t understand. What do SolarTech’s business loans have to do with their political shenanigans?”
“Nothing in the world. This is one hundred percent about image, and there’s no currency on Earth my father values more. Even with the federal stipends attached, what SolarTech is proposing to do is insanely risky, financially. The goal is to make any impending failure as uncomfortable for Rutherford as possible.”
Patience felt like she was trapped in a Fun House. Everything he said seemed like a distorted reflection of the reality she recognized. “Would your father actually forgive a company’s debts over some random, shared connection to a senator?”
“Of course not.”
“Is there anything illegal or improper about it? Would he be investigated, or accused of anything underhanded?”
“No, not at all.”
“Then would it really be such an ordeal for him if he found out about it after the fact?”
“Yes, it would.”
Patience rubbed her eyes and her uncle stepped in.
“So, they intend to coerce your father into backing the senator by exposing what you kids did last night?”
Zane shook his head. “Alex and Joey lack the subtlety required for coercion. They’ll go straight for full-scale blackmail. Keeping a story like this from hitting the press would be persuasive stuff to my father. If they get to him before we do, they’ll have his support in this election, and in every race for the rest of Rutherford’s life. Come Tuesday, we’ll be trying to take down a sitting U.S. senator, and that’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to pull off.”
“Is your father really that powerful, Zane?”
“Yes.” He sighed. “He is.”
“Then why are we standing here? They could be halfway to Hyannis by now.”
Zane laughed at the thought. “You don’t just drop in to see my father, Patience. Not even Alex is brash enough to try that. You can’t get in to see Rutherford without an appointment, and you can’t get an appointment without… Well, you can’t get an appointment. There are ways that things are done, extortion notwithstanding, and Alex won’t blow it by disrespecting protocol. This is his one shot at the whale.” He looked down. “Anyway, I’ll know within seven minutes that the call’s been placed, and as of seven minutes ago, it hadn’t been. He’s going somewhere to think and plan.”
“What does seven minutes mean?”
He pulled her to the window, with John in their wake, and pointed down to the carriage road below his apartment window. “Seven minutes is the longest it will take the Boston team of my father’s security force to clog up that lane with armored SUVs. It’s been clocked under every imaginable hazard and traffic condition, and trust me, it’ll be quicker than that. I’m on furlough from the imposition of my father’s protection right now, and that’s a detail no one but me is happy about. My independence will be revoked the second there’s a perceived threat against any member of my family, and it won’t be pretty. Rutherford’s chief of security will have eight men on top of me before Alex has hung up the phone.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Ed O’Brien,” he corrected. “But I wouldn’t screw around with either.”
Patience shook her head at the carriage road. An armored security detail descending on a nondescript apartment building
on Commonwealth Avenue and blocking arbiter access would definitely put an end the low-profile aspect of Zane’s Allston experiment. The thought of that made her indescribably sad.
John tapped Zane on the shoulder and they turned back from the window.
“I mean no disrespect, and I get that you’re not exactly on food stamps, but it’s not like you’re one of them Hilton kids. I’d never heard of you before I got the—”
Patience held a hand up for her uncle to stop. Zane smiled uncomfortably at his shoes. “New money employs people to get them into the papers, Sir. Old money employs people to keep them out.”
“The Hiltons are new money?”
“My father would certainly say so.”
John appeared convinced. He grabbed his rifle up from the floor.
“Where are they now?”
Zane leaned back against the wall. “That’s difficult to say. Joey’s family has several properties within an easy drive of here, and Alex has the two—”
John waved him off and cocked his ear upward. He winked at the ceiling and slid the rifle back into its holster. “They’re traveling west on the Mass Pike, headed toward the address our boss beamed to your mobile phone before my beloved niece, here, took her siesta. They plan to stop there and get their ducks in a row before making the trek down to Hyannis.” He turned to Patience. “It looks like your friend has called this one, Pax.”
Patience’s jaw dropped, but Zane nodded.
“Wellesley,” he said. “That’s Alex’s place. It’s in the Hills.”
“All right then.” John smiled. “Let’s go take ’em out.”
Patience froze a moment and looked up at Zane. He appeared equally perplexed. She leapt at her uncle as he reached for the door and pulled him back to face her.
“When you say, ‘take ’em out,’ Uncle John, what exactly do you mean by that?”
His face softened slightly as he shook his head at her.
“You saw those pictures, kid. There’s no room for fooling around here. I know this sort of thing can be upsetting in the beginning, but the hard choices get easier with time. God loves the world that grieves Him, and He’s doing what He can, but a little power in the hands of a narcissistic attention-junkie like your senator or a depraved domination-loving goon like his handler can ruin the fun for everyone. Well, He’s not ready to throw the towel in yet, Pax, so He needs us to help Him out.”
John turned back and Patience grabbed his arm again.
“We can’t kill them, Uncle John. Are you mad? Not a drop of blood can be spilled by our hands!”
“Sure it can, kid, and a hell of a lot more behind it. Come on now, time’s a wastin’.”
“No!”
He tossed her off again as Zane lunged for his other arm. John just pushed him aside and pulled the rifle from his back. He pointed it at them as Patience scrambled to her feet, but Zane pulled her down and held her to the floor.
“Understand that I love you like sunlight and smog-free air, Pax. There’s not a day that’s gone by these past ten years when I haven’t thought about your sweet face or that crazy-intuitive brain of yours, and I will never hold one bit of this against you, because it’s who you are. You’ve grown up beautiful, and I’m real proud of you. I have to go now, though. It is what it is. I’ll see you on the other side.”
“You can’t kill them,” Patience cried. Her voice echoed in the empty hallway as her uncle disappeared down the stairs, just as ghost-like as he’d appeared. She sobbed into Zane’s shirt until the slam of the first-floor foyer door confirmed that John was gone and he drew her up from the rug.
“We can make this right,” he said. “We can stop them all. Come on.”
She shook her head as her tears threatened to choke her into incoherence. “It’s too late, Zane. Rockwell and Forsyth are minutes from Rockwell’s house, and my bloodthirsty uncle is after them with a double-dealing God as his personal GPS. They’re dead already.”
“Bullshit. I may not understand why your uncle’s been sent here, but he has been and we can’t worry about that now. We’ll deal with Uncle Rambo as the occasion requires. The promise we made was to stop Joey and SolarTech, and that’s all that matters. They may all have a head start, but we’ve got a goddamn Bugatti, so grab your coat and let’s go.”
She caught Zane by the arm as he collected Forsyth’s weapons and his keys. “What if it’s not The Biz my uncle’s been working for all this time?” she said. “What if it’s something else?”
He looked down at her for a moment, but didn’t respond. Forsyth’s phone cried Oh! and a single word appeared.
GO!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Patience covered her eyes as the Veyron topped one-hundred-sixty miles per hour on the Pike. Zane eased up to scream through the FAST LANE at the toll booth he had no transponder for and hit the gas again as they cleared the merging lanes. They were a quarter-mile south on 95, weaving in and out of traffic like a ballerina dancing across a minefield, before the bells had even rung. They’d already outrun a couple of State Police cruisers, and it was starting to look as though the troopers might be throwing in the towel.
“I can’t feel my face.”
She said it to no one in particular, which was good, because Zane couldn’t hear a thing over the engine. He glanced over as he came off the highway, blowing through a red light as he accelerated onto Route 16. He navigated effortlessly around the slow left turners and double-parked cars that Patience barely even realized were there until they’d left them far behind. He hadn’t been overstating it when he’d told her he could drive the car very well. He had, in fact, been outrageously modest. She kept her gaze fastened on the phone and tried not to look at him. This was getting really complicated.
He pulled up to the base of Rockwell’s driveway and she let her head fall back against the seat, indulging in a sigh as the world finally stopped whirring past.
“Is there really this much money in politics, Zane?”
“In Boston?” He laughed, seeming to think that was answer enough. “Alex and Joey do come from money, though. Particularly Joey. They’ve always been pretty gross about it, and their subsequent celebrity and influence have only made them grosser. That’s all that is, though, and there’s nothing about a large house that should intimidate you. You’re twice as intimidating as the two of them together, Patience, and a far more formidable person. You need to watch out for Alex because he’s devious and ambitious, and because he’s a soulless son of a bitch. Not because he’s rich.”
She nodded, feeling anything but certain, and held her breath as he killed the engine and let the Bugatti glide up the last half of Rockwell’s drive. He eased it to a stop behind a mud-splattered Hummer SUT with a gun rack attached to its bed.
“John.”
They were greeted by muted strains of shouting as they pulled their guns from their coats and slid past the truck to the busted front door. Zane nudged it open with his foot and they followed the clamor to the basement. They crept down with their backs to the wall, but their caution proved excessive to their situation. They could have driven the Bugatti down those stairs without being heard over the unholy racket rising from the farthest corner of the basement.
John was hanging upside-down, tied by his knees to a rafter and hollering the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers.” A seething Rockwell stood below him with a polo stick in one hand and a Beretta 9mm pistol in the other, shouting for him to shut up. Forsyth was padlocked into a sturdy-looking wooden stall behind them, along with the garden equipment and a couple of barely broken-in dirt bikes, and he was yelling as well—although what, or at whom, the senator was yelling was difficult to ascertain over the more dominant voices in the basement.
Zane slid up behind Rockwell, who responded to Forsyth’s warning shouts with a poke of the stick through the slats before turning back and punching John with his gun. The skin above the SCUD’s temple split, and judging by the condition of his cranium, it hadn’t been the first blow
of the afternoon. Zane pressed his gun to the back of Rockwell’s head and the campaign manager froze. He relinquished his Beretta and the stick and Zane pushed him toward the stall. He held him there a moment while Patience relieved him of an arsenal that left Forsyth’s in the dust.
“Nunchucks.” She sighed. “The three guns, the Taser, and the Buck knife weren’t enough for you? You felt compelled to carry nunchucks, as well?”
Rockwell didn’t respond to that. Patience found the key to the stall and opened the gate as John grinned down at her.
“You two sure did take your sweet time getting down here, Pax. Damn near gave myself laryngitis covering up the racket of that rocket engine your friend’s got.”
“How did you know we were …?”
He pointed a finger upward past his knees. “We’re really not totally on our own here. Maybe if you’d stop smashing up your mobile phones, you’d start to understand that.”
“Or maybe He could try speaking to me properly—in plain English, using actual words.” She pulled off her sweatshirt and pressed it to his temple. “I’m no happier with Him than I am with you at the moment. We had an agreement, and He’s broken it by sending you here, with all your zeal and ammo.” She paused and looked away. “That’s assuming, of course, that it’s really Him who’s sent you.”
John just shook his head as a drip of blood slid past the sweatshirt into his hair. “Come on, now, Pax. You can’t believe a thing like that. It’s more than biology that connects us and always has been. I’m upside-down and bleeding. This is no time to lose your faith.”
Patience turned back to him. “Faith is something I’ve never had, Uncle John. I’d expect you to know that about me if you’ve really been where you say you have all these years.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“You’ve got faith, Pax.” He sighed. “You’ve got more than most. Your problem is that you don’t know what it is. You’re a bit of a perfectionist and you have a tendency to be a touch judgmental in some regards. What some consider searching, you call doubt. What some consider questioning, you call disbelief. Hell, you’ve even got faith in things you’ve already rejected, but you have no Earthly concept of what lurks at your core because that rigid brain of yours scares your better angels into hiding. Well, your angels ain’t so defenseless as they might seem. They keep right on working behind the scenes. Still, it’s no day at the spa, living in that head of yours. Is it, kid?”