Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  But she didn’t run the detail. Not yet, anyway. There was plenty of time for that. And she believed in Butler, even before they hooked up. He was very, very good at his job. He didn’t need her to question him, because he questioned himself constantly. When the time came for a decision, he made it, but you could be sure he’d considered every angle.

  So she was prepared to cut him some slack on this.

  She stamped her feet again and turned. The worst part of the cold was the way it took you out of yourself. It was not so much painful as distracting. It demanded its own portion of attention; keeping warm became the body’s priority. Her focus narrowed to a tunnel.

  The rest of her mind was filled with dread. Dunn was sure she wasn’t alone in this. There was a confidence that came from being on the president’s detail. Like the others, she knew she was one of the best in the world at what she did. You had to be pretty self-assured to willingly put yourself between assassins and terrorists and the man they wanted to kill.

  But she wasn’t stupid. She knew none of them would stand a chance against the Boogeyman. Only Cade would. And Cade was scary enough himself. Standing near him, she understood viscerally the shift he represented. His existence informed you that your place in the world was nowhere near as secure as you believed. Now, out here in the night, that feeling of dislocation threatened to overwhelm her. Dunn had the same feeling she got at the top of very tall buildings when she looked down: that some unknown force would cause her to fly over the edge and hurtle toward the ground, as if rationality itself would turn inside out and tear her from safety and toss her into the sky.

  She put all that aside as best she could, labeled it in a box in her mind marked do not open.

  She flexed her fingers around her gun and flashlight and swept the roadside with her eyes again. The beam of her light barely penetrated the gloom.

  A stray wind carried a noise to her ears. A crunching sound. It could have been a footstep on a stray cornstalk. Or it could have been nothing.

  She turned to Fisk. “Gary? You hear that?”

  He cocked one hand to his ear. He couldn’t hear her, let alone a footstep.

  She tried yelling this time. “I said, did you—”

  Dunn didn’t finish the sentence. From out of nowhere, an ugly, edged weapon flew through the air and stuck Fisk through the throat before splitting the back of his neck and skull.

  It was so fast.

  Dunn turned and aimed. But she wasn’t able to get her finger through the trigger guard quickly enough. The cold had dulled her reflexes just enough.

  A dirty-yellow moon came bobbing from the dark at her, resolving in a flash into the latex smiley-face mask of the Boogeyman.

  He hit Dunn just as she got the gun pointed in his direction. He was so goddamned fast. She’d been knocked around by much bigger men but never hit harder. Her legs left the ground and she landed on her back a dozen feet away. She tried to reach for her gun, but the wind was knocked out of her and a sharp burst of pain lanced through her from her right arm. Looking at it, she saw it bent completely the wrong way above the elbow. He’d broken bones without even trying.

  Then the yellow mask was above her as she gasped for air. He didn’t let her get any. She could almost feel the reluctance in his fingers as he began choking her. If he’d had more time, she bet he would have preferred the blade. That was in his profile. He liked the cutting. The thought came to her in an abstract, detached way. Dunn realized that was bad but couldn’t find any strength in her limbs to fight.

  He probably would have rather taken his time with her. That was in the profile, too. But she knew that he wouldn’t risk her shouting or making any noise. Not if he wanted to get to the president.

  Butler, she thought. He was going to be next. The Boogeyman would have to go through Butler to get to Curtis.

  No, she thought with sudden anger. Not if she could help it.

  Her right arm was dead and useless. But the left still clutched the big Maglite. She swung it like a club.

  Without looking, the Boogeyman caught it in one hand. With the other, he kept choking her.

  Dunn saw her fingers lose their grip on the Maglite and her arm fall away. Everything was very distant now.

  She hoped Butler would be all right.

  It would have been nice if her last thought was of him. But it wasn’t. It was of Cade.

  She wondered why he wasn’t there to stop this.

  THE BOOGEYMAN WAS DONE throttling the woman. He got off her corpse and walked over to the body of the other agent. He braced one foot against the dead man’s chin and yanked his blade free from the bone and meat.

  He began walking down the line of buses. Another pair of agents was between him and the president’s car. He longed to simply attack, but he needed them to die silently. He could kill every agent here—and he would—but he didn’t want to have to do it all at once. The weight of numbers, the guns—it would all be an even greater delay. If he wanted to do this quickly, he had to work quietly. Just for a little bit longer.

  The Boogeyman crouched down at the roadside and waited for the agents’ attention to turn. Just for a second. That was all it would take.

  CADE MOVED LIKE A BULLET. He could smell the Boogeyman—the scent of meat and rot and curdled sweat from all the changes forced on its poor mortal frame. It glowed almost visibly, like a trail in the night.

  He was moving faster than ever before. Human blood charged his veins like lightning. He’d never felt so alive in undeath.

  The Boogeyman was at the edge of the Secret Service’s perimeter, hunched over and waiting. He appeared to be waiting for two agents to turn their backs to him. His jungle cutter was out of its scabbard, resting easily in one hand.

  Cade smiled, baring his fangs.

  This was going to be easy.

  Cade’s foot took one glancing step on the earth, barely seeming to touch as it propelled him along. Cade could see the Boogeyman start to turn his head, the movement as slow as a glacier creeping down a mountain.

  Cade was already on him by then, pounding away with both fists, pummeling the face behind the mask.

  The Boogeyman was on his back, arms pinned by Cade’s weight. The cutter was somewhere in the dirt. The Secret Service finally moved, as if answering a postcard lost for years in the mail. Cade felt like the fight was over already.

  Then the idiots shot him.

  It didn’t hurt—his skin had healed and snapped into its armorlike fibers again—but it did surprise him. He hesitated while the agents sent another volley of heavy-jacketed rounds into both him and the Boogeyman. Cade lifted his head to shout at them, but at the speed he was still moving, it would be nothing more than high-pitched gibberish.

  The distraction was enough for the Boogeyman. With a massive burst of strength, he twisted and turned under Cade. Cade went tumbling to one side as the Boogeyman scrambled away from the road, seeking nothing more than escape.

  Cade started to go after him, but the Boogeyman ducked down, scooped up his cutter, and, almost casually, flung the blade over his shoulder toward the agents.

  It flew like a dart for the head of the one on the left.

  Cade knew he had only a split second to save the man’s life. It wasn’t really a choice. The oath bound him to protect the officers of the president.

  So he pivoted on his toes and leaped, flinging himself into the cutter’s flight path.

  He snatched it from the air, stopping it cold.

  Everything seemed to slam to a halt as the handle smacked into his palm. He went back down to human speed. For him, it was like stepping out of an F-14 into quicksand.

  The agents stood there gaping, still facing the wrong direction, guns locked open, clips empty. They had caught only the vaguest of shapes and sounds from the high-velocity combat scorching the air around them. To them, it looked like Cade had simply appeared out of nowhere, holding the cutter in one hand.

  They began babbling, asking all the usual questions. C
ade ignored them. He held the hatchet in his palm. He scanned the darkness but knew it was useless. The Boogeyman was gone.

  He should have been angry. He should have felt some guilt at least for snuffing out a human life and for failing to save the lives of Fisk and Dunn. Instead, he found he couldn’t stop smiling.

  Cade had managed to frighten the Boogeyman.

  THEY REGROUPED BY THE BUSES. The media were still snoring away. The engines of every vehicle in the caravan started as if they’d all been freshly tuned. A demented chorus of ringtones sang from every pocket and jacket as cell phones suddenly grabbed signal again. Even the wind stopped spitting ice crystals in their eyes.

  Butler walked to the lead bus from the president’s limo. Cade, Zach, Candace and Lanning waited for him. He rubbed his eyes.

  “It could have been worse,” he said. “We’ve got a tow truck on the way. We’ve already got our cover story.” He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes again. “We’ll say Dunn and Fisk were in the lead car. The truck is bringing a Crown Vic that’s pretty smashed up. We’ll take a few photos. No one’s going to look too closely.”

  Butler closed his mouth and clenched his jaw too tight. He seemed to shove whatever he was feeling into a place where it couldn’t surface for air. His face was calm again when he continued.

  “We were lucky,” he said. “No civilian casualties.”

  “Not exactly,” Cade said. They all turned to him.

  “Who?” Butler asked.

  “Follow me,” Cade said.

  He began walking off the side of the road. Butler took out a flashlight to follow.

  Zach tagged along. No one else would have noticed it. Then again, no one else had spent as much time as he had with Cade. And though he couldn’t point to anything specific, he knew something was wrong. Cade was always quiet. He was always contained.

  This was different.

  MEGAN ROARK’S BODY was not yet cold when they found it. Butler played his flashlight over the corpse and the wound, then quickly pointed it away.

  “God damn it,” he said. “He practically cut her head off.”

  Zach only took a short glance at the body. He was too busy struggling with his own unpleasant emotions: relief, mainly. Roark was the biggest pain in the ass of any of the press corps—not because she was the smartest, or even closer to the truth than the others, but because she kept picking at the same scabs over and over. People listened to her, even if it was only because she pitched her voice just below a hysterical shriek. She was the only one Zach worried would question the car accident. He wanted to slap himself for being grateful to the Boogeyman.

  Latham, who’d been manning the barricades at the eastern side of the caravan, stumbled down from the road. He stopped suddenly when he saw the body.

  “Ah, Christ,” he said.

  “Well?” Butler snapped at him.

  Latham got it under control. “Yeah. She was following us. I stopped her back at the perimeter. She must have gotten out of her car. Or been taken out of it.”

  “Probably got out,” Zach said. “She might have been trying to get closer to the buses.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” Butler said. “Shit, shit, shit. Well. Latham, go get the perimeter tape, cordon this area off. We’ll need to get a forensics team here. Find out what county we’re in, so we can alert the local—”

  “Hold it,” Lanning said. His chin was down almost to his chest. Zach recognized the look. Lanning was plotting something.

  He looked up. They all looked back.

  “What’s the point?”

  Butler struggled to find a response. “Fucking what?”

  “We know who killed her,” Lanning said. “Same deranged prick who’s already killing our people. We’re already doing everything we can to stop him. How is it going to make our job any easier if we bring in the local cops on this as well?

  Zach didn’t like where this was going. “You’re not suggesting we leave her here?”

  Lanning scowled. “Don’t be an asshole, Barrows. All I’m saying is, we don’t make things any more complicated. We make this public and the media will start picking away at our story. How did she happen to die at exactly the same time we had a car crash? If there’s an autopsy, people are sure as shit going to realize that she wasn’t in a wreck. Then we might have to admit, ‘Oh hey, Roark was right about there being a killer on the campaign trail after all.’ And who knows where that could lead?”

  “A lot of unpleasant questions,” Zach admitted.

  “Exactly,” Lanning said.

  “Wait a damn minute,” Butler said. “It’s one thing to lie about what happened to my agents—they signed on for this. But this woman was an innocent bystander.”

  “No question,” Lanning said. “But let’s look at this logically. Nobody except Latham saw her catch up with us. She wasn’t traveling with the campaign. She was already an unstable person. It makes a lot more sense if she simply disappeared.”

  “Except that isn’t what happened,” Cade said. Zach turned to him, surprised. Cade had been too quiet. And frankly, he’d expected Cade to agree with Lanning. Something else was missing, too. He couldn’t quite get his head around it.…

  “I know we’ve got body bags in the trunk of the limo,” Lanning said to Butler. “Have your guys bag her up and get her car out of here. Drive her off a bridge or bury her somewhere. But this didn’t happen. Not here. Not tonight.”

  “You’re a piece of shit,” Butler said. He looked ready to spit.

  Lanning nodded. “I’m worse than that. But I’m going to get Curtis back into the Oval. So do as you’re goddamned well told.”

  Lanning turned back toward the buses. “Barrows, you’re with me.”

  They followed Lanning, slipping in his leather-soled shoes back up the slope to the highway. He muttered curses. Cade followed them both. That’s when Zach realized what was missing.

  Cade hadn’t objected when Butler said “goddamned.” Someone had taken the name of the Lord in vain, and Cade let it slide without a word.

  He looked at Cade—really looked at him. Despite the beating and the bullet holes, Cade seemed stronger, more alive, than he had in—well, than in the entire time Zach had known him.

  Cade noticed Zach staring.

  “What?”

  “What happened to you out there?” Zach asked Cade quietly. “How did he get past you?”

  “I was indisposed,” Cade said.

  “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  He showed Zach the syringe that had been stabbed into him. He described his near-death experience.

  “It took me a few moments to recover,” Cade said.

  “Holy crap,” Zach said.

  “That was more or less my thought,” Cade said. “Something like this is black-budget technology. And the compound that it contained had to have been developed in a bioweapons lab.”

  “Shadow Company,” Zach said.

  “No. I don’t think so. Graves is dead. The Company is still in some disarray.”

  “Sounds like a good reason for them to try to kill you.”

  Cade’s lip curled in his ghost of a smile. “You would think so. But I find it hard to believe it would work with the Boogeyman. If they wanted a president dead, they’d simply use a high-powered rifle.”

  “You say that like it’s happened before.”

  Cade didn’t reply.

  “Okay,” Zach said. “Moving on. Who would have access to this kind of equipment and would also know about you, and the Boogeyman, and would be batshit crazy enough to try to cut a deal with him…”

  Zach finally got where Cade had been for some time.

  “Helen Holt,” he said. “But she’s dead.”

  “Apparently not as dead as we thought.”

  Cade seemed a little too sure of his conclusion from too little evidence.

  “Cade. If you knew something I didn’t, you’d tell me, right?”

  “I know a lot of things yo
u don’t, Zach. We don’t have that kind of time.”

  Zach realized Cade was hiding something. He wondered what it was. More important, he wondered if he even wanted to know.

  CANDACE ELECTED to tell the press—now that they were waking up—what had happened.

  Zach went with her. Cade, after getting cleaned up and into a new suit, came along as well.

  She delivered the news flatly and without emphasis. It wasn’t maudlin or cheap. She simply said that two agents had died. Her manner alone said everything else: that it was pointless and tragic and stupid.

  “We’ll be on our way just as soon as the trucks clear the road,” Candace said. She turned to leave.

  But a balding, middle-aged reporter stood up.

  “Why should we believe that?” he said, belligerent. “You lied to us before. You said there were no injuries.”

  Another reporter stood in the aisle as well. “Yeah,” he said. “We don’t appreciate you playing games with us. We had a right to cover that story. If this is how you’re planning on dealing with the press—”

  Candace whirled on the reporters. “Excuse me? You really think you were owed a chance to snap photos of two dead people on the road? Tell me where I find that in the First Amendment. Come on. I’m curious.”

  The reporters didn’t speak.

  “That’s what I thought. For the record, I didn’t lie to you. I told you what I was told. But if I had known—then fuck yeah, I still would have lied to you. If you think doing your jobs means getting a close-up of a body in a car wreck, then mine includes making sure their relatives never have to deal with that nightmare on the evening news.”

  She turned and walked away.

  Candace’s unspoken message blared out loud and clear to Zach: any day, she might have to see her father’s corpse on every front page in the world. There would be no escape from it. He knew she wasn’t so naive as to think she could prevent that. But for people whose parents weren’t the president, she could try to maintain a little respect for the dead.

  Once she was off the bus, one of the reporters found his voice. “Wow. I guess the rumors were true: she really does know how to give a tongue-lashing.”