Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

“She can be a handful.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “What’s wrong, Frank? She say something poisonous about me? I’ve heard she does that.”

  “No, nothing.” He pulled into a parking lot. This was not a conversation he wanted to have while driving. Might endanger the public.

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Change of plans. We’re hitting the plant tonight. Meet at the armory in an hour and a half. We’re suiting up at three, going over last-second details. Turkey Point’s been notified, Sheen is fine with it, Claude says he’s raring to go. Their three-day window starts at sundown today. We’ll move in at eleven p.m. Probably be done by dawn.” He could hear her breathing. “So get moving. Can’t be late for this.”

  “This cold shoulder, Frank, I’m on your shit list now?”

  “You’re not on my shit list.”

  “Then why didn’t you consult? Why alert me at the last second?”

  “I’ll see you at three. We’ve got a uniform that’ll fit you. We’ll provide lasers and vests. Weather’s supposed to be clear, eighties, light breeze from the south. This won’t be Prince Key again. I promise you that.”

  * * *

  Just after noon Flynn and Prince returned from a quick run-through, up and back to Turkey Point, to make sure Flynn had the route clear. Flynn was looking relaxed, his face lit up, chapped by the wind and sun. Docking in front of the assembled group, he handled the Whipray nicely, slipping into the tight space between Thorn’s skiff and the Chris-Craft, coming alongside the pilings without a bump. Cameron tossed the lines to Thorn and stepped ashore.

  “Piece of cake,” Flynn said to Leslie. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Everyone had gathered at the dock to await their return, Leslie with the cell phone still in her hand. The Chee brothers were perched side by side on the seawall.

  “There’s been a change,” she told Flynn and Cameron, holding up the phone. “Drill’s going down tonight. They’re going to hit at eleven.”

  “Why?” Cameron said.

  “Somebody got a wild hair. A conflict in schedules. Who can say?”

  “Maybe they’re suspicious?”

  “Don’t think it’s that. Our guy blames it on some FBI power play.”

  “And the gator roundup?” Thorn being helpful, one of the team.

  “I’ll get my gear and you and I will head out now.”

  Cameron followed Leslie to the house, Wally tagging along. Pauly climbed off the seawall, went over to the Whipray, pocketed the ignition keys, gave Thorn a long, warning look, then headed up the lawn to join the others.

  “Listen, Flynn.” Thorn was knotting the bowline to a cleat.

  “Save your breath. I’m going ahead with this. What Pauly did to Sugar, that was wrong. He and his brother are seriously fucked up. But the rest of us aren’t like that. I believe in this. It’s important, worth the risk. Someone has to take a stand or there’s not going to be anything left worth saving.

  “People your age, you won’t be around when the worst of it starts, so it doesn’t matter. My generation didn’t screw it up, but we’ve got to fix it if we’re going to survive and leave something for our kids. So stop trying to push me around. Decision’s made. Just back off.”

  Thorn looked off to the eastern sky where a single frigate bird was hanging high in the blue distance like the silhouette of some prehistoric dragon. To sailors long at sea there was nothing graceful about that bird’s soaring flight. They saw it simply as an ominous sign, a symbol of impending doom. Until this moment Thorn had never entertained such horseshit.

  “All right,” he said. “I get it. It’s completely your call. I don’t have a say. But listen to me for one second. Another issue.”

  Flynn was squatting down beside the rear cleat, retying the stern line. Pauly had halted on the back deck, keeping watch on the two of them. Thorn was pretty sure he was out of earshot. But he kept his voice low.

  “There’s a pistol in Sugar’s car. Might come in handy.”

  “You’ve got me confused with somebody else. I don’t shoot people.”

  “I’m not talking about shooting people. You say you want to survive, that’s what I’m talking about.”

  Flynn rolled his eyes up to the heavens and shook his head.

  “If you change your mind,” Thorn said, “it’s in the glove box.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “SURE, MCIVEY. YOU WANT TO drive, help yourself. Just not so fast this time, okay? We’re in no hurry. Curtain doesn’t go up till we walk onstage.”

  Her mouth stretched into a smile, but her eyes remained estranged. Whatever heat there’d been was finished, along with Sheffield’s usefulness.

  Everyone wore black trousers, black shirts with gold FBI logos front and back, and all of them were fitted out with laser-sensitive vests. No Kevlar tonight. Minus Billy Dean, it was the same crew as Sunday night, everyone haggard and hungover from the ordeal, but still fairly upbeat at the news that no one was going to be docked for the Prince Key mess.

  Out in the armory parking lot in the balmy night air with the Suburban gassed up, doors flung open, ready to roll, Sheffield walked from man to man in a last-minute inspection. One more time everyone presented his handgun, opening the clip or cylinder, showing it was empty, working the slide. Worst threat in a drill like this one, a live round snuck into the mix.

  Frank took a close look at each of their vests, checking the battery packs, the Velcro fasteners, making sure their white, reflective armbands were in place. When he got to Nicole, she was slipping her phone in her trousers pocket.

  “You were making a call?”

  “Texted my dog-sitter. Told her I won’t be home tonight.”

  “You have a dog?”

  “A corgi. Why?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Max. Jesus, you want to polygraph me about my dog?”

  Frank turned to the group. “Make sure your phones are off. We’re not on the grid tonight. All the way off, not just silent.”

  When they’d finished checking, he raised a hand for quiet. “Okay, I promise, this is the last time.”

  To a chorus of groans, he did one more step-by-step repeat of the attack plan. A variation of one of Nicole’s scenarios. Very basic: concussion grenades for distractions, slip past the sentries, more grenades, more distraction, move into the control room and take over.

  If all went well, no lasers were fired. Rub Sellers’s face in how his crew of rent-a-cops were so grossly incompetent, even with advance warning they couldn’t stop a group of hostiles coming through the front door. The best possible outcome, besides wholesale changes to security procedures at Turkey Point, would be that Sellers was demoted to latrine duty for the rest of his days.

  But something told Frank this simple plan he was selling to his guys was going to be bumpier than he was making out. Yeah, Frank had high confidence in his guys’ superiority to the security team at Turkey Point, and he was changing things up, running a hurry-up offense that should have them on their heels, but all afternoon he’d been having the same gut quivers he’d felt out on Prince Key just before Nicole reached for the ice chest. Then a minute ago, catching her with her phone, the quivers ticked up a notch.

  As the men were buckling into their seats and Nicole settled behind the wheel, his phone buzzed in his pants pocket. Frank disobeyed his own order. He huddled behind a light pole out of view of the truck. Angie Stevens.

  “You find something?”

  “I found something. How’d you know?”

  “A guess, Angie. What is it? Another software bomb?”

  “A virus.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “It’ll take time. A virus spreads and hides. This has gotten into so many nooks and crannies it would be weeks to find it all, and if I missed a scrap of code anywhere, it would take hold again and mutate.”

  “This is in the closed loop?”

  “Correct. The network that runs internal p
lant operations.”

  “So how does it get set off? Someone inside?”

  “Could be that, or could be it’s triggered by some other signal. Like a surge of data, a flicker in the power source. I haven’t figured that out.”

  “Solution?”

  “Quarantine.”

  “Put a tent over a nuke plant? What is that? Shut it down?”

  “Just until all the software can be scrubbed.”

  “Jesus, shut down the whole plant?”

  “If you’ve got a better idea…”

  “Can’t do that, Angie. You keep working, just do your best.”

  The ride down I-95 at ten-fifteen on a Tuesday night was slow going. Must’ve been a concert at AmericanAirlines Arena downtown or some damn thing. His four guys were telling jokes in the backseats. A gorilla and a nun are sitting at a bar. When that one’s done, Dinkins starts with an old favorite, an Irishman and a Brit and a Scotsman stumble into a pub, Dinkins nailing the accents. The guys laughing from the beginning at the elaborate setup.

  Nicole looked over at Frank, alone with him in the front seats. “That talk Portia gave you.”

  Frank said nothing, watching the traffic breaking up ahead as they left 95 and headed west on the Don Shula Expressway.

  Nicole said, “There’s another side to the story.”

  “This probably isn’t the time.”

  The guys were fully engaged with the joke-off in the rear seats. A priest stumbles into a brothel. Voices quieting down as the humor turned smutty.

  “Just so you know, Frank. There is another version. I’m not the person Portia told you about. She twists everything to fit her political agenda. Every successful woman is a slut, except for her.”

  “Let’s do this later.”

  She was in the speed lane, clipping along well over the limit. “Fuck it. Believe what you want to believe.”

  “Everything okay up here?” Dinkins was leaning forward, hands on the back of their seats. His face between them.

  “We’re cool,” Frank said.

  Dinkins gave Sheffield a long look, then sat back in his seat.

  Frank swiveled around, looked at his guys, everyone watching him. “Okay. So the Dalai Lama goes to see a chiropractor.”

  * * *

  Two miles from Turkey Point, Leslie Levine pulled the battered SUV onto the shoulder of the entrance road. The three gators, their snouts duct-taped shut, were flopping around inside the cage, straining the slats, probably agitated by the proximity of the python in the other side of the box.

  They were small gators, two years old, the longest only four feet, snout to tip of tail. But Leslie was satisfied. They’d do the trick. Clear out the control room in a hurry and give the whole enterprise the media-friendly weirdness she was after. And the symbolism was on point. The clash of the natural world with the technological nightmare of the power plant.

  Though to Thorn, the dopiness of it harked back to those yippie stunts of his youth, revolutionaries showering dollar bills onto the floor of the US Stock Exchange and mocking the mad scramble that ensued. Fine for that trippy time, but in this somber, hair-trigger era, goofing with a nuke plant, gators or not, wasn’t going to be anybody’s idea of comedy.

  It struck him, as they waited in silence, that this felt like a caper concocted in a log cabin way off in the woods, a gang of twenty-year-old ringleaders all stoned and giddy, saying, yeah, yeah, gators, man, and Burmese fucking pythons, yeah, that’s fucking perfect. But out on the lonely, dark stretch to the power plant, the smell of the gators filling the car, as gamy and fetid as stagnant water, the mood was not giddy.

  Leslie’s binoculars were trained on the patch of lighted roadway a few hundred yards back down the asphalt, a single streetlamp shining amid miles of utter darkness. No traffic had passed by since they’d pulled onto the shoulder. Twenty minutes of waving away mosquitoes, their whine the only thing that broke the deadly silence.

  Thorn was riding shotgun, Cameron and Pauly in the backseat. Leslie standing out on the edge of the road with the binoculars.

  “Maybe it was called off.” Cameron’s voice was tight.

  “It’s not eleven yet,” Leslie said. “Relax. We’re fine.”

  “That ditch is full of water,” Thorn said. “They’ll drown, you leave them there.”

  No one answered.

  The highway had narrow shoulders. The deep gully on one side, a flood canal on the other. A perfect choke point.

  Leslie’s cell phone rang, she took it from her pocket, checked the screen, and answered. Listened for a minute, then said, “Okay, I understand. Loading-ramp door, it’s open? Good.” Then clicked off.

  Thorn looked at the keys hanging from the ignition. Scoot over, crank the engine, race down the highway, he might get a hundred feet before Pauly throttled him. Or he could hop out here, make a dash. But even if he managed to outrun them and save himself, Sugarman and Flynn could be doomed. Sugar, immobilized, vulnerable to Wally’s whims. Flynn left dangling. No telling how any of that might play out.

  Too many variables, all of them risky. He saw no choice but to ride this out a few steps further, alert for his best chance to trip them up.

  “It’s them,” Leslie said. “Get set.”

  She handed Thorn the binoculars, slipped behind the wheel of the SUV, started the engine, pulled across the road, angling toward the approaching vehicle, then switched on her flashing emergency lights.

  “Fucking A,” Cameron said. “Let’s shut this city down.”

  In the cargo hold the gators thrashed and grunted in their wooden box as though sensing the rising tension. Thorn set the binoculars at his feet and tightened his seat belt. He watched the headlights bearing down, then turned the other way toward the long stretch of highway, squinting into the darkness where they were headed, where his starry-eyed son was to meet them in an hour’s time.

  “Don’t worry, Thorn.” Leslie patted him on the thigh. “Flynn will be safe. I’d never let anything happen to the father of my child.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “WHAT THE FUCK?”

  “Slow down, McIvey.”

  Dinkins leaned forward, stuck his head between the seats.

  “This part of the drill?”

  “Looks like an add-on,” Frank said. “What do you think, McIvey?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Is there a choice?” said Sheffield. “We stop, find out what the hell’s going on. Could be an accident.”

  “Doesn’t look like any accident,” Dinkins said.

  “Put your brights on. Roll up close. Everybody stay put.”

  As Nicole coasted forward, coming to within thirty feet of a beat-up SUV, four people piled out wearing FBI uniforms and white reflective armbands identical to their own. Two of the four had weapons drawn.

  “Reverse it, McIvey. Get out of here.”

  Nicole slipped the shifter into park, drew out the ignition keys, and dropped them at her feet.

  “Oh,” Sheffield said. “That’s how it is.”

  “Run, Frank? Really?”

  “Hey, what do we do, Shef?” Dinkins speaking for the others.

  A slender woman with short hair, holding a revolver at her side, stepped into the headlights. A giant muscled-up guy moved beside her, held his hand up to block the brights, another guy hanging a few steps back.

  “So how’s this supposed to go down, McIvey? You save the day, win a Medal of Honor? Because, boy oh boy, I’d pay good money to see that.”

  Another man with a ponytail, lean and athletic, loped into the shadows to their right.

  “Pauly Chee,” Frank said. “Our bomber.”

  “We being carjacked?” Dinkins said.

  “Worse,” said Frank.

  “Bad night to be unarmed,” Dinkins said.

  Chee was at his window, tapping on the glass with his Glock, motioning him to crank open the window.

  “Or I’ll smash it,” Pauly yelled.

  “These t
he ones from Prince Key?” Dinkins again.

  Sheffield told him, yeah, it was them, the fucking peaceniks.

  Looking out his window at Pauly Chee, Frank said to Nicole, “I’m curious. The boathouse, that first night. Was it real? Or just to set this up?”

  “It felt real, didn’t it, Frank? Isn’t that what matters?”

  McIvey pressed the electronic lock release on her door panel.

  “All this just to get past Portia? That’s nuts. You know that, right? How crazy you are.”

  “Fuck you, Frank.”

  “We tried that. Didn’t work out so well.”

  Frank’s door swung open.

  “Which one of you is Sheffield?”

  Frank waved a hand.

  Chee grabbed his shoulder and dragged him out onto the dark road.

  Then Pauly stuck his head back inside the SUV and said, “The rest of you stay put or this shitheel dies.”

  * * *

  Leslie kept ordering Pauly to stop. No, no, no. But he ignored her. Taking charge.

  Thorn watched as Pauly dragged an agent from the passenger side of the big SUV and shoved him into the glare of the headlights.

  And good Christ, it was Sheffield. The feds had sent the first team.

  Twice in recent years Thorn had observed Frank in action, seen up close what he was capable of. A smart, savvy guy, grace under devastating pressure. Not the man you wanted on the other side of the ball.

  “Cuff him.” Pauly left him with Prince and returned to the big SUV.

  “Now one by one,” he called out. “Step out of the car. Driver next.”

  Cameron wrestled Frank’s wrists behind him and clipped the flex cuffs on. When he was done, Sheffield took a couple of steps toward Leslie and Prince grabbed his arm and yanked him to a halt.

  “This is a serious error, Levine,” Frank said. “Yeah, yeah, I know who you are and I know what you did. Faked your death so Mom would have a story to tell your little girl, Julie, when she asks about you someday.”

  Thorn saw her stiffen, the pistol rising, aiming at Frank.

  “Am I right?”

  “My daughter has no part in this.”

  “Of course not, but I bet dear old mom has a clue what you’re up to, which is what we call conspiracy. It’s enough to ship Julie off to foster care. That what you want?”