Jack Kilborn & Ann Voss Peterson & J. A. Konrath

by Flee - a Thriller

  The young man who has come to greet her smiles and tries to take her duffle bag, but she says, “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” and keeps walking, her eyes catching on the colony of white canvas tents standing several football fields away near the northern edge of the forest. Still probably an insufficient distance to avoid the stink when the wind blows out of the south.

  “Good flight in?” he asks.

  “Little bumpy.”

  “It’s so cool to finally meet you. I’ve read all about your work. I’m even using two of your books in my thesis.”

  “That’s great. Good luck with it.”

  “You know, there’s a few decent bars in town. Maybe we could get together and talk sometime?”

  She lifts the strap of her heavy bag, swings it onto the other shoulder, and ducks under the yellow crime scene tape that circumnavigates the pit.

  They arrive at the edge.

  The young man says, “I’m doing my thesis on—”

  “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Matt.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Matt, but could you give me a minute alone here?”

  “Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”

  Matt heads off toward the tents, and she lets her bag slide off her shoulder into the grass, estimating the dimensions of the pit at thirty-five meters by twenty meters, and presently attended to by nine people, seemingly oblivious to the flies and the stench, each in their respective worlds, doing what they walk this earth to do. She sits down and watches them work. Nearby, a man with shoulder-length graying hair buries a pickax into a wall of dirt. A young woman—probably another intern—flits from station to station, filling a bucket with backdirt to be added to the mound of grave fill near the southern edge of the pit. Everywhere that human remains have been exposed, red flags stand thrust into the earth. She stops counting them after thirty. The nearest anthropologist appears on the verge of pedestaling a skeletonized body, down to the detail work now—poking chopsticks between ribs to clear out the dirt. Other skeletons lie partially exposed in the upper layers. The remnants of human beings with whom she will become closely acquainted in the weeks to come. Deeper, the dead are more than likely mummified, possibly even fleshed depending on the water content of the grave. Beside the autopsy tent on the other side, tables have been erected in the grass, and at one of them, a woman she recognizes from a previous UN mission is at work reassembling a small skeleton on a black velvet cloth to be photographed.

  She realizes she’s crying. Tears are fine, even healthy in this line of work, just never on the clock, never in the grave. If you lose control down there, you might never get it back.

  Approaching footsteps snap her out of her reverie. She wipes her face and looks up, sees Sam coming toward her, the bald and scrawny Australian team leader who always wears a tie, especially in the field, his rubber boots swishing through the grass. He plops down beside her, reeking of decomp. Rips off the pair of filthy, elbow-length gloves and tosses them in the grass.

  “How many have you taken out so far?” she asks.

  “Twenty-nine. Mapping system shows a hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five still down in there.”

  “What’s the demographic?”

  “Men. Women. Children.”

  “High-velocity GSWs?”

  “Yeah, we’ve collected a ton of .223 Remington casings. But this is another weird one. Same thing we saw in that mass grave in Denver. Maybe you heard about it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Dismemberment.”

  “Have you determined what was used?”

  “In most instances, it’s not a clean break, like a machete or ax strike. These bones are splintered.”

  “A chainsaw would do that.”

  “Clever girl.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So I’m thinking they cut everyone down with AR-15s, and then went through with chainsaws. Making sure no one crawled out.”

  The blond hairs on the back of her neck stand erect, a rod of ice descending her spine. The sun burns down out of the bright June sky, more intense for the elevation. Brushstrokes of snow linger above timberline on the distant peaks.

  “You okay?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah. Just that this is my first mission out west. I’d been working New York City up until now.”

  “Look, take the day if you want. Get yourself acclimated. You’ll need your head right for this one.”

  “No.” She stands, hoisting the duffle bag out of the grass and engaging that compartment in her brain that functions solely as a cold, indifferent scientist. “Let’s go to work.”

  THE president had just finished addressing the nation, and the anchors and pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.

  Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin.

  She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.”

  Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.

  “I got called up,” he said.

  “Your Guard unit?”

  “I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”

  “Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”

  He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you feel like it’s going to blow over?”

  A new banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen—45 dead in a mass shooting at a Southern Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dee said.

  Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.

  “Obviously. The whole country—”

  “That’s not what I mean, love.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer right away, just sat there for a while, smoking.

  “It’s been coming on now, little by little, for days,” he said finally.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I barely do myself.”

  Through the cracked window of their hotel room—distant gunshots and sirens.

  “This was supposed to be our week,” she said. “You were going to tell Myra. I was—”

  “You should go home, be with your family.”

  “You’re my family.”

  “Your kids at least.”

  “What is this, Kiernan?” She could feel an angry knot bulging in her throat. “Are we not in this together? Are you having second thoughts about everything or what?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?”

  She couldn’t see all of his face in the mirror on the opposite wall, but she could see his eyes. Gaping into nothing. A thousand-yard stare. Somewhere other than this room. He’d gone deep, and she’d sensed it even before this moment, in the way he’d made love to her. Something held back. Something missing.

  She climbed out of bed and walked over to her dress where she’d thrown it against the wall two hours ago.

  “You don’t feel it?” he asked. “Not at all?”

  “I don’t understand what—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Kiernan—”

  “Fucking forget it.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Dee pulled the straps over her shoulders as Kiernan glared at her through the cloud of smoke around his head. He was forty-one years old, with short black hair, and a two-day shadow that reminded her so much of her father.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”
>
  “You and I are not the same anymore, Dee.”

  “Did I do something or—”

  “I’m not talking about our relationship. It’s deeper. It’s…so much more profound than that.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She was standing by the window. The air coming in was cool and it smelled of the city and the desert that surrounded it. A pair of gunshots drew her attention, and when she looked through the glass she saw grids of darkness overspreading the city.

  Dee glanced back at Kiernan, and she’d just opened her mouth to say something when the lights and the television in their room cut out.

  She froze.

  Her heart accelerating.

  Couldn’t see anything but the flare and fade of Kiernan’s tobacco ember.

  Heard him exhale in the dark, and then his voice, all the more terrifying for its evenness.

  “You need to get away from me right now,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s this part of me, Dee, getting stronger every time I breathe in, that wants to hurt you.”

  “Why?”

  She heard the covers rip back. The sound of Kiernan rushing across the carpet.

  He stopped inches from her.

  She smelled the tobacco on his breath, and when she palmed his chest, felt his body shaking.

  “What’s happening to you?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t stop it, Dee. Please remember that I love you.”

  He put his hands on her bare shoulders, and she thought he was going to kiss her, but then she was flying through darkness across the room.

  She crashed into the entertainment center, stunned, her shoulder throbbing from the impact.

  Kiernan shouted, “Now get the fuck out while you still can.”

  To continue reading RUN by Blake Crouch, visit your library or favorite ebook retailer and pick up a copy today.

  Delilah and I were enjoying a late dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint Louis. Softly lit, intimate, and unpretentious, it was one of her favorite restaurants, and though I typically shun any behavior that might be used to fix me in time and place, an occasional last-minute reservation was something I was learning to live with. Delilah was grateful for the concession, and expressed her thanks not in words, but in kind, ceding me the seat with the view of the entrance and, through the large front windows, open now to the fine spring air, the antique street and sidewalk without. She never suggested that she might watch my back, as she was willing to let me watch hers. I wondered if she was afraid of my response, and how it might reveal the limits of my trust, limits which she sensed but wasn’t yet ready to face head-on.

  I had arrived earlier that evening, a longtime habit for which Delilah typically affected neither approval nor reproach. An astute tactician, she understood the importance of examining terrain through a potential enemy’s eyes before occupying it oneself. And though her own routines were less rigorous—she would say less paranoid—than mine, she was patient with these vestiges of the life I was determined to leave behind. She believed in me, she’d told me, believed I was more than the iceman, the killer inside me who’d been running my life and was constantly, insidiously trying to regain his position in the driver’s seat of my psyche. She told me she understood that I wanted to be done with all that, out of the life, free of the past, the iceman departed, deliquesced, deceased.

  It was never going to be easy. I’ve known men returned from war who had trouble sleeping without their boots on and a rifle close at hand, and I’ve understood their difficulty. It’s hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism’s survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted. What can the habits hurt? the survival mind wants to know. And, sadly, things like a chance for peace and hope of redemption aren’t responses it finds much persuasive.

  But even worse than the tenacity of my psyche was the stubbornness of my circumstances. Because how was I going to get out of the life while Delilah was still in it, while her own behavior was constantly, insidiously cuing and inciting my own? And why should I even want to, when she was always implicitly telling me her work with Mossad was more a devotion than her relationship with me, when she was always refusing the commitment to me that I was trying to make to her?

  We fought a lot, and the fights were getting worse. Sometimes she would belittle my professed desire to get out of the life, pointing out my ongoing need for tactical behavior, which I in turn would blame on her. We took turns with patience and frustration. But no matter the argument, no matter whoever or whatever was at fault, it was true I couldn’t relax when I saw her without first performing what, to a civilian who didn’t know better, would probably be diagnosed as a weird species of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So in the hours before our scheduled dinner, I strolled the narrow boulevards of the island, reminding myself of its routes and rhythms, reacquainting myself with its lines of entry and points of escape. It was a beautiful evening, the sky pastel blue, the trees budding with tentative green, and the banks of the Seine were thronged with pleasure seekers, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Just past Rue Boutarel on the Quai de Orléans, I paused and joined them, admiring the sunset silhouetting Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, a short walk away across the Pont Saint-Louis. I watched the sky glowing pink, deepening to red, and finally surrendering to violet and indigo, and wondered what it all must have looked like a few thousand years earlier, before this small spit of rock in a river had been subject to the minds and hands of men, and what it would look like a few thousand years hence, when war or climate change or some deep immune response from the earth itself had cleansed the area of the humans who claimed it now, and nature made it once again her own.

  And now, satisfied that I had a way out if I needed one, I sat in the back of the restaurant on one of the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sounds of French and German and English, all pleasantly scrambled by the close walls and the dark, beamed ceiling; enveloped by the smells of boeuf à la bourguignonne and soupe à l’oignon and petits bouchées d’escargots sauce roquefort; and savoring the sight of the beautiful, deceptively elegant blonde across from me, who, if we could find a way past our professional tensions and make common cause of something better, I thought might actually be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  Delilah smiled and asked me in French, “What are you thinking?”

  She was wearing a simple, cream-colored silk wrap dress with tasteful but still tantalizing décolletage, and the candle on the table between us was casting distracting shadows. I let my I eyes linger where they wanted to linger, then smiled lasciviously and said, “About what I might want for dessert.”

  She smiled back. “Well, for that, you have to see the menu.”

  “I’ll have to take my time with that. If it all looks good enough, I might even order more than one.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can handle that much?”

  I looked into her blue eyes. “I don’t know. I’ll have to taste it and see.”

  She gave me a challenging look, the kind that would make weak men wilt and strong men wild. “Then come back to my apartment. We’ll see if your eyes are bigger than your stomach. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t stay tonight. I have to leave early tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?” I said, immediately irritated at myself for asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Or rather, the response.

  “John. Why do you ask me that? You know I can’t tell you.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “And I can’t tell you that, either. As you know.”

  I felt a stupid petulance taking hold of me and tried, without much success, to shrug it off. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I said, “A day? A month? How long this time?”

  She sighed. “Longer than a day, less than a
month. I think.”

  I looked away, nodding. “You think.”

  An American in an expensive blazer and with perfectly groomed three-day facial stubble was blathering into his mobile phone at the table next to us. I hadn’t noticed until just then, having been focused more on whether Delilah and I were speaking quietly enough not to be overheard than with whether anyone else was talking too loudly. I looked over, and his girlfriend touched his arm to let him know his phone monologue was annoying someone. He glanced at me but didn’t change his volume. My irritation with Delilah was looking for an outlet, and I considered snatching the phone out of his hand, breaking it in two, shoving one half down his throat and the other up his ass, and putting the whole thing back together inside his chest. But that would get me noticed, and then some, and with my mostly Asian features, I was already a bit more noticeable in Paris than I liked.

  To continue reading PARIS IS A BITCH by Barry Eisler, visit your library or favorite ebook retailer and pick up a copy today.

  I walked into my neighborhood bar, a fierce winter wind following me inside. It wasn’t my favorite watering hole, but it was within walking distance of my place, and I was so cold my balls were making clinking noises every step I took.

  I stood at the entryway and paused, taking the place in. It was darkish, grimy, still smelling of cigarettes even though Chicago had banned smoking indoors years ago. The after-work crowd had dwindled down to the diehards—those without families to go home to.

  I didn’t have a family of my own to go home to. I wasn’t looking to find one, either. They were expensive, messy, and needy. My presence at the bar was twofold. First, I needed a drink. Second, I hoped to get a little something-something. Nothing made the cold, winter nights easier than a little bit of strange.