He could hear a steady drone and see the spiders growing like black moss on the walls and ceiling of the jet. He could feel them crawling on him. His skin itched and he jerked and swatted. He sat up with a start and blinked hard. He’d been dreaming. A nightmare. A dark speck floated across his vision and he rubbed his eyes to clear them. Nothing. He saw one of the flight attendants, a brunette named Wilma or Wanda or something like that, staring at him, and he tried to straighten up in his seat. He knew he looked like a mess. The movement made him wince. His head, his stomach, his ankle, the fever. He felt like hell. Screw it, Henderson thought, and he stayed slumped in his chair, not even bothering to try to give her a smile.
She walked down the aisle and over to him to touch his arm. “We’ll be touching down in about ten minutes, Mr. Henderson. Can I get you anything before we land?”
He thought he saw something moving in the corner of his vision, another black spot, but when he flinched and turned, there was nothing there. Just his reflection in the window. He rubbed his eyes again, and that seemed to chase away the floating specks that teased him. “A tonic water would be good,” he managed. “And see about turning down the temperature. It’s hot in here.” She started to turn, but he called her back. “And get my assistant on the line. I feel like shit. Tell her we’re going straight to my doctor.”
She nodded and retreated to the galley. Henderson closed his eyes for a moment and then snapped them back open. The tonic water was on the table in front of him in a heavy cut-glass crystal tumbler. He must have nodded off for a few seconds. He shook his head. He didn’t want to fall asleep again. As lousy as he felt, sleeping meant dreaming, and right now dreaming meant those goddamned spiders. He had been scared of spiders even before his trip to Peru, even before he watched his bodyguard’s face dissolve. At least here, on his jet, he knew that the only spiders were the ones inside his head. Which was killing him. The headache was a pressure that seemed as though it was centered in the middle of his forehead. He’d ask for some aspirin when Wilma or Wanda or whatever her name was came back.
He could feel the jet descending, and out the window were the first real outskirts of Minneapolis. He usually liked coming back to town, looking out over the city where he’d been born and raised and where he’d started one of the largest technology companies in the world. Today, however, when he tried looking out the window the light made him wince. It was like something pushing on his eyeballs. He could feel each beat of his heart like a hammer blow to his temple. Worse, he could feel something tickling inside his skull, a sneeze building up, and with this headache he knew that a sneeze was going to feel like the worst thing in the world. The pain in his head was suddenly enough to make black dots swim in his vision.
He sneezed. He saw a fine spray of blood coat the wall. Snot dripped from his nose. It felt like something was skittering around in there, and when he wiped at it, he realized something was skittering out of his nose. He felt the hairy, hard leg and pulled it. Holy fucking shit. It was a spider.
He just pulled a fucking spider out of his nose.
He had one of the spider’s legs pinched between his fingers. The bug swung and clicked at him. It was making an actual clicking sound with its mouth or its mandibles or whatever the hell they were, and then the spider turned itself so that it was against his hand, biting into the flesh. It was a sharp pain, worse than a pinch, but oddly icy. He swore, and flung the creature away from him.
And then whatever pain was left in his head, the bite from the spider, the fact that he’d even had a fucking spider come out of his nose, was written over by the burning in his leg. It was worse near the cut he’d gotten in the jungle, as if somebody were holding a lit candle to his skin, and it radiated up and around his calf. He stared down at it, and for a moment he thought he might be having another nightmare, because he could actually see his skin bulging and rippling. He heard himself grunting and then screaming, and though he knew it was from the pain in his leg, it was both similar to and completely different from a dream: he was outside himself, watching. There was part of him that was writhing in his leather seat, straining against the seat belt, clutching at his calf and both shrieking and crying, and there was a part of him that seemed to be watching calmly as the flight attendant ran down the aisle toward him, followed by the copilot rushing from the cockpit. He wasn’t sure what part of him watched the skin around his ankle split open, a zipper of blood and blackness, as spiders spilled out onto the floor, swarming over Wilma or Wanda, over the copilot, leaving all three of them screaming and thrashing at the pain and the biting, and he didn’t even try to figure out what part of him watched as a thin line of blackness rolled toward the open cockpit door. And then he couldn’t see anything at all, but he could feel it when the plane pitched steeply forward.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Mike flashed his badge at the uniform sitting by the door of Leshaun’s room. “Agent Rich. Mind if my daughter sits out here for a couple of minutes while I say hey to my partner?”
The uniform, a young Asian kid who looked fresh out of the academy and bored out of his mind at having to sit outside a hospital room all day, looked at Mike’s suit and badge.
“What’s she doing out of school?”
“She had a fever last night. She’s totally fine, but school protocol is for her to be fever-free for twenty-four hours. I’m off today, so we’re trucking around. You know how it is,” Mike said. The cop raised his eyebrows. “No, I guess you probably don’t know how it is. Just part of having kids.”
The cop nodded and motioned to the seat beside him. Annie didn’t even glance up from the game she was playing on Mike’s phone, sliding into the chair and continuing to make her little duck eat pellets or whatever it was the duck was supposed to be doing. The cop looked over Annie’s shoulder and crinkled up his brow. “Hey, how’d you get past level eight?”
Mike stepped into Leshaun’s room and closed the door behind him. He could see Annie through the glass door. He knew the hospital wasn’t the best place to take his daughter, but he also knew that if his partner was up for it, he’d be pleased to see Annie. He wasn’t sure that Leshaun would be up for it, however. Two bullets. One to the vest and the other to his arm.
Mike hovered for a minute, watching Leshaun sleep, and then decided against waking him. The doctors had said Leshaun would be out of the hospital tomorrow, back on the job in a week or two. He was lucky as shit. The first bullet had gone clean through his biceps. Even though it had been a bloody mess, the bullet missed anything of real importance. It was probably going to take Leshaun longer to get over the second bullet, however. He had two broken ribs from where the vest caught the round, and those were going to nag for a while. Mike put the magazines he brought on the nightstand next to Leshaun and pulled out one of his business cards from his suit pocket so he had something to write a note on. As he clicked open his pen there was a loud sound from outside the hospital, a big whomp, and then the floor shook slightly. He looked out the window but couldn’t see anything, so he scrawled a quick note on the back of his card, telling Leshaun to give him a call and that he’d stop back later.
Outside the room, Annie was watching the cop play the duck game on the phone, giving him pointers on how to eat the most pellets.
“You hear that sound, Officer?” The cop looked up from the phone and sheepishly handed it back to Annie.
“No sir. I’ve been stuck on level eight for a while, and your daughter was showing me how to get past it.”
“She’s a smart kid, that one,” Mike said. “Thanks for watching her.” He reached out to take Annie’s hand. “Come on, beautiful. Uncle Leshaun’s still sleeping. I’ll come back later, after I drop you off at your mom’s. What do you say we go get some ice cream, see if it cuts the heat a little?” He shook his head. “Crazy weather for April, isn’t it?”
In the parking garage, he was already starting to back the car out when his phone rang. Annie knew the drill and handed it up front witho
ut complaint. Mike didn’t recognize the number, but it was a DC area code, so he picked up.
“Is this Special Agent Rich?”
“Yep, but I’m not on the clock today.”
“You are now. This is the director.”
“The director of what?”
“The director.”
Mike had to stop himself from blurting out, “Bullshit.” Not that Annie had never heard him swear before, but if it was really the director of the agency, it wasn’t in his best interest to sound like a moron.
“There’s been a plane crash,” the director said. “Happened maybe five minutes ago. You’re the closest agent in the vicinity, and we need you there.”
Mike cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear and shifted the car into drive. “I heard it. Didn’t know what it was.”
“Well, you do now. You know Bill Henderson?”
“Of Henderson Tech?” Mike said. The phone Mike was talking on was an HT model, and the computer he had in his office was an HT as well. And even if Mike hadn’t known what kind of phone or computer he had, there probably wasn’t a single person in the entire country who didn’t know who Bill Henderson was, let alone in Minneapolis, where Henderson was the success story to end all success stories. Henderson employed more than forty thousand people on nine campuses on the western edge of the city. And that was just in Minneapolis. “Yeah, I know Bill Henderson. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is. Why?” Mike asked, then immediately said, “Oh.”
“Right now we don’t have any reason to suspect it was anything other than an accident. You’ll get more details on-site, but when a billionaire falls from the sky, particularly a billionaire who was the president’s largest donor during her last campaign, all bets are off. If anything—anything—looks like terrorism or like it was something other than just a plane crash, I’ll expect a phone call directly. And I mean anything. If I find out from the television that there was something suspicious and you haven’t already told me about it, your career will look less promising. You can let the locals set up a perimeter, but we’ve got a team ready to be wheels up within the hour and on the ground by midafternoon. Make no mistake: the agency is going to be on this one. You call this number, the one I called you from. Keep me tight in the loop on this one, Agent Rich. You got it?”
“Uh, yes sir,” Mike said.
“Good. Here’s my assistant. He’ll give you the details.”
Mike took the address from the assistant, hung up the phone, and then turned to look at Annie.
“Sorry, beautiful, but this is a big deal. We’re going to have to take a rain check on the ice cream, okay?”
Annie scowled, but he could tell she was faking it, and she didn’t raise a fuss when he said he had to call Fanny.
The phone clicked through to voice mail. “Fanny,” Mike said, “it’s me. Something came up. I need you to come get Annie. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t a big deal, but trust me when I tell you this, I really can’t get out of it.” He left the address for Fanny and asked her to call back as soon as she could, resisting the urge to tell her to follow the plume of smoke. The gray ribbon was thick in the air, and even though he knew the address he had been given was more than ten blocks away, the smoke looked closer. As he drove, he tried Dawson’s number, but Annie’s stepdad was evidently away from his phone as well. Mike had to step hard on the thought that the reason his ex-wife and her new husband weren’t answering the phone was that they were naked and in bed.
“Okay, beautiful,” he said over his shoulder. “Mommy’s not answering, so you’re going to be stuck with me for a while. I’ve got to do some work.”
He flipped the cherries on even though he didn’t drive faster than the speed limit, conscious of his daughter sitting in the back. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic, though he could already see the strobes of emergency vehicles up ahead.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, beautiful?” he said, distracted by her voice and by what her voice meant: that he’d have to figure out what to do with her once they got to the crash site. Annie wasn’t sheltered. She knew that he worked for the agency, knew he carried a gun, knew that occasionally there were guys like Two-Two who might shoot at him, knew why Leshaun was in the hospital, but that didn’t mean Mike thought it was the best idea to walk around with her near the smoking crater the plane would have left in the ground. Or, oh hell, he thought, it was probably worse than that. Almost certainly the plane hit a house or a building or something.
“Daddy,” Annie said, and there was something measured and hesitant in her voice. “I think I’m getting too old for you to call me ‘beautiful’ all the time.”
“Oh.” Mike slowed down at a red light and then, after checking both left and right, cruised through the intersection. He could hear sirens growing closer, and wondered how big of a clusterfuck this was going to be. Ambulance, fire, police. City workers, utilities, probably county and state everything. Likely to be feebies or other federals too. “Okay, beau—Annie. Annie.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror, but Annie was looking out the window, watching the buildings pass by. It was something he knew she must have been thinking about, and even though the expression was overused, it broke his heart. It was too soon, he thought, too soon for her to be negotiating the passage from being a child to being an adult. She was only nine, for Christ’s sake, not even into the double digits yet. Of course, that wasn’t what really bothered him about it. He called her “beautiful” because she was beautiful, and she was his Annie and would always be his Annie no matter what he called her, but he couldn’t shake off the conversation from the day before, the way Fanny had insisted that she and Annie had to have the same last name. Mike hadn’t asked Fanny to change her last name to Rich when they got married but she’d done it anyway, and he hadn’t fought when Fanny changed it to Dawson when she remarried. He understood that when you married a guy whose first name was Rich, you probably didn’t want your last name to be Rich, particularly when it was a name you’d brought along from your first marriage. Still, it stuck in him that Fanny thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to change Annie’s last name. Fanny had never been the kind of woman to use their kid as a pawn, and he was sure she didn’t mean it that way, was sure she meant exactly what she said—that it was too weird for her to have a kid with a different last name—but he didn’t understand why it was now, months after Fanny Rich had become Fanny Dawson, that it suddenly mattered so much. Why now? What had suddenly changed in his ex-wife’s new marriage?
Oh.
Now he understood.
“Hey beau—Annie?” he said. It was going to take some getting used to. “How’s Mommy been feeling? Everything okay at home?”
“Fine,” Annie said.
A fire truck came barreling through the intersection ahead of them, and Mike slowed down to check both ways before turning. They were close enough that he could see people standing on the sidewalk and pointing. A block away, maybe two.
“She been sick at all or anything like that?”
“She’s been sleeping a lot,” Annie said. “She’s been going to bed earlier than me. Rich has been reading to me before bed.”
Mike brought the car to a complete stop and closed his eyes. He thought he might puke, which was kind of funny since he’d basically been asking Annie if his ex-wife was suffering from morning sickness. She hadn’t been sick when she was pregnant with Annie, but she’d been tired the entire first trimester.
There was a burst from a siren behind him and he opened his eyes and then pulled out into the intersection, turning the corner. He was about to ask Annie another question, but then he saw the building.
It was a school. “Oh fuck,” he said.
“Daddy! You owe me a dollar!”
“Sorry Annie. I’ll get you later, okay?” The street was choked with ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks, and in his rearview mirror he saw something that looked like it might be a SWAT truc
k rolling after him. The building was old and faced with brick, and he saw that the sign out front read BILL HENDERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. He wanted to laugh. Henderson’s plane had evidently crashed on the property of the elementary school named after him, but the sight of two or three hundred children milling around on the front lawn stopped him from finding it funny. “Fuck.”
“Daddy!”
“Right. Sorry. It’s just. Okay.” He tried calling Fanny again, but once again, it went to voice mail. He pulled the car to the side of the street, angling it in next to a police cruiser, and then just sat there for a moment considering his options.
“Daddy?”
He sighed. He didn’t really have any options. He’d never even seen the director of the agency before, except on TV when he was going through congressional hearings. If Mike fucked this up, he was going to find himself transferred out of Minnesota and working the ass end of the worst posting in America, wherever that was. He looked back at Annie and saw she was staring at him, waiting for an answer. “It’s my boss,” he said, though he didn’t really think he could explain to her. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave Annie in the car, but if he didn’t get out of the car—he couldn’t ignore a direct order from the director of the agency—he wouldn’t be living near Annie anymore anyway. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Let’s do it,” he said. “How do you feel about helping me out today, sweetheart?”
Annie shrugged, but she got out of the car when he did. She tagged along as he walked past the spectators and the gathering camera crews, kept with him as he held out his badge and ducked under the yellow tape that had already gone up. He turned the corner of the building and stopped with a sudden surge of relief. “Thank. Fucking. God.”
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