As he continued his meteoric ascent he managed to avoid any more killings, not because this troubled him, but simply out of expediency. There was always the risk that a clever medical examiner would figure out the cause of death. He didn’t believe they could ever trace the poisoning back to him in any case, but why take any chances?
Eventually he set his sights on the House Intelligence Committee and used techniques he had polished all of his life to gain its chair: threats, intimidation, blackmail, seduction, and charm. He became an indispensable friend and ally to key players. And in the end, he even hired a ridiculously expensive call girl to set up a rival so he could force him to remove his hat from the ring.
The Intelligence Committee was perfect. It put him in a position of power and influence and allowed him to meet the exact people he was most interested in knowing. Where the real power was.
The Intelligence Committee oversaw the CIA, NSA, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fourteen other intelligence gathering organizations. Fisher wasted no time identifying key players in the intelligence community, both obvious and behind the scenes, and did favors for some while gathering dirt on others.
If knowledge and access were power, then Marc Fisher was a god.
Which is what made his current situation so maddening. Despite all of the tentacles he had deep into intelligence circles, Hall continued to elude him.
As he gazed out of his window at the human insects milling below him, racking his brain to find yet another angle of attack, his Personal Digital Assistant, which he had named Annie, sensed that he was alone, and came to life to carry out a previous instruction. “Mr. Fisher,” it said from his tablet computer in a pleasant feminine voice, “the video file you’ve been waiting for has arrived. Please acknowledge notification.”
“Acknowledged,” he replied to his PDA, knowing that Annie would continue to replay the message unless he did so.
Fisher didn’t expect this video to help, but he was obsessed with Hall, and determined to learn anything and everything he could about the man. He had watched the footage of Hall at the Oscars endlessly, searching for any clue that might help him.
But only recently, when he had tried to imagine Hall’s journey from Palm Springs to the Cosmopolitan, did it occur to him there might be footage of the staging of the attack. When Hall was leading his team to capture the warehouse so they could use the same tunnel left behind by Islamic Jihad.
And such footage did exist. Taken by a street camera nearby. Like everything else about Hall’s involvement in the attack, it had been classified and buried so deeply that it took some doing even for Fisher to resurrect it. But he had not let this deter him.
He didn’t expect the footage to be worth the effort, but he wouldn’t rest until he had turned over every last stone.
“Annie, notify my assistant that I don’t want to be disturbed, lock all doors, and throw the video up on the television screen.”
There was a brief pause. “Assistant notified. Doors locked. And your video has been sent to your television and is ready to play.”
“Is there any sound, or just video?”
“Just video.”
Fisher poured his now-finished Manhattan into a cocktail glass and faced the forty-inch screen hanging on one wall. “Okay. Play it now. Actual speed.”
The video footage began to play out on his screen. A small church bus rolled quietly into view of the camera and stopped. A malicious grin came over Fisher’s face. A fucking church bus? Really?
The men who had ended the siege were now commonly known as the Oscar Angels, so perhaps it was only fitting that they would prep for their attack in a church bus. If only the public knew.
The bus was stationary for several long minutes while Fisher continued to study his screen. Finally, Nick Hall emerged, looking just as he had on the stage of the Cosmopolitan, in a ski mask and casual clothing. Behind him, two of his team, in full combat gear, followed.
And then another.
Marc Fisher almost dropped his cocktail.
It was a girl! A girl not mentioned in any of the reports.
“Freeze footage,” commanded Fisher. “Continue forward at one quarter actual.”
The girl was dressed casually and was not wearing a mask. She was petite, with a pleasant face that seemed unusually expressive. He watched, spellbound, as she hugged Hall and then backed away, tears now streaming down her cheeks.
She stared into Hall’s eyes like a lovesick puppy. It was absolutely sickening. After only a few seconds of this, however, she tore her eyes away from Hall and quickly retreated back into the bus. Hall tracked her as she left, and even with a mask on his body language screamed love and longing.
And weakness.
Fisher slumped into his chair in shock. She was perfect. He’d bet his last dollar Girdler hadn’t bothered to make sure she was invisible to facial recognition.
But she wasn’t just his ticket to finding Hall. She was his means to control him.
This girl was certain to provide yet another demonstration of the inherent superiority of the psychopath. Psychopaths were immune to love. But the strongest, most invulnerable heroes could be crippled by it.
Love was the ultimate Achilles’ heel. A tried and true means to control the most powerful of men.
Superman could not be captured unless Lois Lane was used as bait. Spider-Man had Mary Jane. Thor would do anything to protect Jane Foster. Iron Man was vulnerable only when it came to Pepper Potts. The list went on and on.
Fisher had Annie rewind the video and freeze it on the image of the girl’s face. He studied her as one might study a rare work of art.
“Who are you?” he mumbled to himself, almost in ecstasy. “And where have you been all my life?”
Then, with the hint of a malicious smile, he added, “And more importantly, where can I find you now?”
PART 3
Unraveling
“Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.”
—Arthur Golden
20
Megan Emerson sat on a concrete bench that snaked into a long semicircle, one of several that resembled the bleachers for half of a theater-in-the-round, with palm trees and water features at the center where a stage might have been.
Bright, colorful shops of every kind flowed around and beyond these concentric semicircles of concrete like a meandering river, and Megan decided she had rarely been in a mall as tranquil and adorable as the Bella Terra Shopping Center in Huntington Beach, California.
The dining, boutiques, and retail stores were higher end than she was used to, but now that she had a five million dollar bank account, courtesy of Alex Altschuler, she could afford not to worry about such things. And she hadn’t been scrimping on groceries, either.
But while this money made life easier, and despite their opulent surroundings, holing up was holing up, and even the nicest of yachts could quickly become claustrophobic.
Megan had already been clothes shopping a few times recently, for both her and Nick, since they had left Palm Springs with only the clothes on their backs. So at this point, they had everything they needed.
Still . . . maybe she would get a bikini anyway. But only if she found one truly amazing, since her real purpose in being at Bella Terra was to people watch and window shop.
And to get out of Nick Hall’s hair.
Their relationship was as strong as ever, but even during the honeymoon phase there were only so many times a day a couple could make love, and so much they could talk about, before they needed some space from each other.
They had been on a boat now for two weeks. The first five to ten days had passed by quickly, but the hours were starting to drag, and Megan knew she and Nick needed some solid time away from each other to keep things fresh. A few days earlier she had visited LA and in a few days she planned to make a day of it in San Diego.
&n
bsp; She was beginning to feel sorry for herself, but was determined to fight this off. After all, poor Nick had it much worse than she did. He hadn’t ventured out from the bowels of the Eos even once, not even to a sundeck. Because the upper echelon of the US government and military had learned of his existence in such spectacular fashion, they weren’t about to stop looking for him anytime soon. The worst part was that he was convinced that even with a rudimentary disguise the odds he would be recognized were exceedingly small, but he couldn’t justify taking any chance, not with the stakes as high as they were.
When they weren’t making love, they continued to brainstorm experiments that they hadn’t tried, new ways to get an understanding of her immunity to his ESP, but things were not going well in this regard either. They had learned a lot, but they were not much closer to their goal than when they had begun over six months before.
In many ways Megan knew her life was better than ever, and she wouldn’t trade it for the world. She was in love. She had the chance to work on an extraordinary problem with a truly extraordinary man. She was friends with the head of Black Ops for the US, as spooky as that sounded, as well as the lovable geek who had become one of the most famous men alive.
Still, even a six-million-dollar yacht could get old. And living with a man who could never come out of hiding, and who would be the ultimate prize for any number of unscrupulous people and governments, was tiring. And limiting.
Megan decided she had killed enough time resting and people watching and wandered around the mall until she came to a Nordstrom’s store. Although it was one of the largest in the mall, it was built to blend in with the style and architecture of the rest.
She took her time walking through the store, drinking in the impressive array of merchandise around her and the many colorful shoppers, some in simple sweats, but far more decked out in clothing as expensive as that being sold here. Just being out and about, and around others, was a godsend, a psychologically therapeutic change of pace after too many hours on the Eos.
She gradually made her way to the women’s section and found where they displayed their bikinis, always in season in this part of the world.
“Can I help you?” said a pretty young woman.
“Just looking for now,” she replied. “Thanks.”
Megan checked out the colorful assortment of suits, and frowned. The trend was not her friend this year, she thought. Crochet and neoprene suits were all the rage, neither of which appealed to her in the slightest. Even worse, many of the suits had a see-through mesh connecting the bikini areas. If she was going to wear a bikini, she was going to leave her midriff bare. She wasn’t sure how mesh had suddenly become so popular.
She shook her head in amusement at a suit with less fabric than a postage stamp and continued browsing.
General Girdler had assured them that their new hideout was almost ready to go, although he was busier and less accessible than ever. Also grouchier. Not that she could blame him. It looked more and more likely his actions, taken unselfishly for noble purposes, would come back to bite him. Hard.
She and Nick had discussed possible permanent residences with the general, and had settled on New Zealand. It was far away, to say the least, and English was its native language. And while neither she nor Nick had ever visited, the country had plenty of cozy, secluded areas where Nick could avoid crowds, but which were populated enough for them to have a life. If they could be discovered in a nondescript home on the outskirts of a small town in New Zealand, then their disappearance from the grid just wasn’t meant to be.
Alex was financing the search for the perfect location for them Down Under, and the purchase of what would become their new home. But the real challenge was finding a way to transport them this great distance without being discovered.
Megan was nervous about the move, as anyone would be about a change this dramatic, but also eager and excited. She had a feeling she would love both the New Zealand countryside and the people, whom she expected to be warm and down-to-earth. And since her profession and passion was graphic design, she could still stoke her creative impulses, and keep herself from going mad from boredom, by bidding for jobs online. With talent, a state-of-the art computer, and access to PayPal, anyone could forge a thriving design business with total anonymity.
But while she was more in love with Nick than ever, she was also more worried about their future than she wanted to admit. Nick was still Nick—brilliant, fun, and fascinating—but he was all too often distant and unresponsive. They both knew the Internet in his head was responsible, exerting its irresistible but pernicious influence. Nick was fighting it, but the compulsion to ignore reality in favor of the endless content he could see and hear in his mind’s eye could be too strong. The opportunity for both entertainment and stimulation too endless.
The longer Nick lived with implants the more worried he became about their impact on society. He had never had issues with addiction—to anything—and believed his impulse control to be very high. So the fact that he would choose to attend to the Web over the woman he loved was troubling.
Megan glanced up from the bikini racks and then back down without fully realizing it, still deep in thought. But in the brief instant she had looked out upon the spacious store, she had seen something that only registered on her subconscious, at the level of intuition. Without knowing why she had a sudden compulsion to survey her surroundings with greater care.
Nine women were shopping in the various departments, and four salespeople were either at cash registers or were helping customers. And two men were within eyesight as well.
While it wasn’t noteworthy to see men in the women’s departments, it was rare to see two of them without a wife or girlfriend.
The two men weren’t moving in unison. Exactly. But Megan sensed that they were somehow together. Both were dressed casually, and both seemed to be trying hard not to look awkward or out of place. Which only made them look even more awkward and out of place.
They were both tall and trim and toned. And even dressed as they were, they couldn’t help giving off a vibe that was distinctly . . . military.
The pair were making their way toward the department she was in, and as she stared at them she got the distinct impression they were going out of their way to look everywhere but in her direction. Their avoidance of the single viewing angle that intersected with her was just as telling as if they had stared straight at her, unblinking, and began to lick their chops.
She was their target!
While her rational mind warned her about paranoia and jumping to conclusions, her intuition screamed at her that she was in trouble. They were coming for her. And quickly.
Megan’s heart began to race and she reached out to Nick Hall with all of her strength, but as she had known, at twelve miles she was too far to connect telepathically.
She walked briskly away from the two men, toward the sales clerk who had tried to help her minutes earlier. “I’m looking for a restroom,” she said quickly as she approached.
The woman smiled pleasantly. “It’s up the escalator to the third floor, and then straight ahead to the back wall.”
“Thanks,” grunted Megan as she accelerated by, glancing behind her and noticing that her pursuers were picking up speed as well.
She ran up the escalator and made it to her destination without seeing the men get on the moving stairway to follow. Maybe she was imagining things. Perhaps they were good friends buying gifts for their wives. But something in her remained certain that this was not the case.
She formulated a desperate plan as she left the escalator. She made a beeline for a sales clerk in the Babies and Toddlers Department, ten feet away. “I’m not feeling well,” she practically shouted at the older woman, out of breath from running up the moving stairs. “Where is your bathroom?”
She already knew the answer, but asking the question was part of her plan.
The woman pointed toward the back wall and Megan rushed off in this direction
. When she was out of sight of the woman she circled back and hid in the center of a circular rack of cotton robes, disappearing within as she had done when she was a little girl, to her mother’s horror.
Megan held her breath and strained her hearing to its limits. “Did you see my wife come this way?” said a man’s voice calmly, faint in the distance. “Black hair. Petite.”
The sales clerk replied too softly for Megan to hear, but she had little doubt the woman would tell them where she had been heading, and this was confirmed seconds later when the two men strode purposefully toward the women’s bathroom.
They stationed themselves just outside the door. They looked distinctly uncomfortable, each like a man who had been asked to hold his wife’s purse, unsure of what to do with himself. Even so, it was clear they were prepared to wait as long as necessary for her to emerge.
Perfect.
She crept quickly back toward the escalators, keeping quiet and out of sight. “Text Nick,” she whispered into her phone as she moved. “I’m in trouble. At Nordstrom in the Bella Terra Mall. Picked up a two-man tail.”
She paused. “Send,” she told her PDA, which immediately complied.
She reached the down escalator and practically launched herself onto it.
As she was rushing down the first few moving stairs, a third man appeared below her at the landing.
She stifled a gasp. His military bearing was all too familiar, and she had little doubt he was with the other men, completing the set.
She had thought she had been clever by freezing her pursuers at the bathroom and doubling back. But they had outsmarted her, after all.
The man was speaking rapidly into his phone, most likely informing his partners who would arrive at the landing above her in seconds.
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