Taking Flight (A Devereux Novel)

by Whiskey, D. G.

  Sara shrugged. “If you say so. I guess I can empathize. It’s like when I sink my teeth into a massive story and keep unraveling more and more threads. I won’t stop until I’ve discovered the whole thing and untangled the web of lies people weave to protect themselves.” She shot him an unreadable look. “Sometimes, the information comes with a price.”

  What is that supposed to mean? Once more he got the feeling he didn’t know everything he should about this woman. She was deeper than the ones he usually dealt with, and he might get lost in that depth.

  “Anyway, that was my night. How was yours?” He wanted to get off the topic of the crash. There were still too many questions he couldn’t answer.

  “Oh, you know, nothing too special. My roommate and I went out to—oh, holy crap.”

  They had come out onto the place where the ground dropped away beside the path, and the whole of the city spread forth in front of them. It was magnificent, but nowhere near as amazing as the view from his plane.

  Derek stepped closer to the edge, but Sara’s hand squeezed his and held him back. She hadn’t budged, still staring out at the view.

  “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” He hadn’t grown up in Los Angeles, but Derek was proud of his for-now adoptive city, and more than just for the lifestyle.

  “Magnificent? It’s terrifying!”

  That wasn’t awe in her voice, he realized. It was terror. Pure terror.

  “Sara? Are you okay?”

  She edged backward, taking him with her. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the sight as though she was afraid if she looked away the cliff would come after her. He stepped in front of her, blocking her view.

  “Hey, Sara?” He stepped closer, and her eyes tracked up from his chest to look into his face. “Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

  As though a switch flicked in her brain, she shook herself a little and shuddered. “Oh, Derek. I’m sorry, I can’t… it’s too much. I thought I’d be able to do this, but it can’t happen.”

  “Are you afraid of heights, Sara?” It seemed odd that a confident, engaged woman like herself could suffer from such a crippling phobia. To say afraid seemed like an understatement compared to her reaction.

  Her jaw trembled as she tried to find the words to speak. “Ever since Michael died… I haven’t been able to stand heights. Even one story off the ground is getting too much, although I can stomach it. The thought of flying…” She barked a short, harsh laugh. “You know I made my roommate drive with me to Los Angeles from Chicago? I had nightmares at the thought of boarding a plane. If I had to take a plane here I would have just quit my job on the spot instead of coming, and I love what I do.”

  Things came together more clearly for Derek. “Michael is the fiancé you lost a couple years ago, right? Did he die in a plane crash? I’m sorry if that’s too direct. We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.”

  She looked almost physically uncomfortable. “No—no, it’s okay. It will help to say it. I’ve been avoiding it for so long now, and it’s just been festering at the back of my mind. Yes, Michael was my fiancé, and…” She struggled to speak for a moment. “…he died in a plane crash two years ago. It was on the way to Los Angeles.”

  Wow, double whammy. No wonder she didn’t want to fly here. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t bring her to the airport like I’d planned. I doubt that would have gone well.

  “I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Sara looked overwhelmed, lost. He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, but he didn’t think that was what she needed at the moment. His suspicions were borne out with her next words.

  “I just… I need space. I need to go. Promise you won’t hate me for bringing you all the way out here for nothing?”

  She didn’t wait for a reply before she bolted back up the trail. Derek stood there, watching that glorious blonde hair bounce away. He looked around, noticing a couple photographers sneaking photos of him, his girl having left him alone.

  Well, that doesn’t happen too often. I bet the tabloids will get a kick out of this one.

  It took a long drive on solid ground, an hour of yoga, a cup of powerful coffee, and time spent trying to think about nothing before Sara could settle the nervous roiling of her stomach. By the time it stopped roaring she was kicking herself.

  “Damn it, Sara. You had Derek Devereux there, on a nice walk, receptive to questions. You were on what can only be termed a date with an extraordinary man, and it would have been natural to try to learn more about him. And what do you do? I’ll tell you what you did. You turned into a shivering, emotional wreck over the death of your fiancé and blew everything, that’s what!”

  Despite how terribly she had handled everything, she hated that Michael represented an obstacle to her moving forward with her life. Something to avoid thinking about, or to get over. It wasn’t fair to him, to his memory. But it was that kind of thinking preventing her from carrying on.

  She tried to force herself to calm down, but it didn’t work. The coffee was a poor choice—it gave her limbs a nervous energy that made her want to bounce around the walls. Becky had left the apartment, out to look at the current fashions and try to network and sell her designs somewhere influential.

  Trying to put the disaster of an afternoon out of her mind, Sara pulled out her list of contacts and flipped through, trying to find anyone she hadn’t called yet and might deliver useful information. It looked bleak. Her list, once a shining resource for any need, had been poorly maintained over the past two years and fallen into disrepair. A few of her best informants within government agencies had changed positions and their old contact information was obsolete. They weren’t people easy to track down.

  While she tried to figure out a path forward, an email popped into her inbox with a distinctive chime. It contained no name or subject line and the address was spoofed to an uninspired anon@anon.com.

  I heard you were asking for highly classified information. We used to have a good working relationship, and while I can’t tell you much, I will say the Onyx Company is exactly what you are looking for. Try searching for government military contracts with the codename Blackbird. Anywhere that Blackbird is listed as the supplier, Onyx or one of its child companies is involved.

  That was it. It was huge. It changed everything—if it held up.

  Responding to the email would yield no response. There were only a few people who could have heard about her inquiries and placed highly enough to help her out, but it was still a bad sign they could find out about her search.

  Her heart beat a little faster. This email was unlike anything she had ever seen before. That someone had found out about her search and contacted her over it meant that others who weren’t looking out for her best interests may also have found out about her digging around in Derek Devereux’s history. Michael’s grim warning about staying out of the military’s path resonated with her. She might have found herself on a different playing field, one where she didn’t know the rules, or even the players.

  Still, the mystique of it all enraptured the journalist in her. She had to know what was going on.

  On an earlier assignment Sara had gained access to a heavily redacted government database, and thanks to a high-ranking contact, she could access the unedited versions of many of the contracts contained within. It was likely the same official who had sent her the clue about Blackbird.

  She pulled up the query she’d originally run and replaced the word Onyx with Blackbird.

  Instantly, hundreds of results popped up, then thousands.

  Holy crap.

  She dug through the list. Some were useless—complete nonsense—but others were more telling, just as the email mentioned. On almost every one, Blackbird was listed as the supplier, and the contracts looked to be heavily weapons-oriented. They ranged dramatically in cost, from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Even with her special access, vast
quantities of information was blacked out, something she had never seen before when dealing with the database and the code she possessed.

  “This is… insane,” Sara muttered. “Hundreds of millions of dollars. All funneled into this one company. And it’s owned by Derek and his brothers?”

  It got even odder. When Sara looked to see which budget the money came from, there was no indication. She tried dozens of contracts, and they were all the same—millions of dollars coming from nowhere and flowing into Blackbird.

  She sat back in her chair. It was as though a door had opened into an alternate universe, one she hadn’t known existed. And it sickened her.

  “Derek must know about this. What services could Onyx render that’s worth that kind of money?” The work she had done on the starving poor of America had shown it wouldn’t take that much to feed and clothe them all—it was embarrassing it was still a problem in a country as rich and wealthy as America. With the kinds of profits Onyx churned out, the Devereux clan could single-handedly wipe out poverty in the country.

  It shook her to the core. She had thought Derek was a good man, but what did she know about him? Was he as good an actor as those he liked to surround himself with? She hadn’t been able to get him to divulge much information about himself, and there was no telling whether anything she had gotten was truthful or accurate.

  And here I’ve been, blurting out everything I am and my entire life story to him at every available opportunity. He must have thought she was pathetic. The only secret she hadn’t spilled was that she wasn’t here because of a story on the homeless, but instead targeted him. Maybe he already knew, and that’s why he singled her out at the air race gala and had been wooing her ever since.

  It was a remarkable twist, if true. And she could all too easily picture it being the truth. For a man of his resources and connections, how hard would it be to discover she’d asked after him and his company? At least one of her old contacts had already discovered that information.

  A crash at the front door startled her, and she almost jumped across the room. It was a big, echoing boom, and Sara waited, poised, all of her fight-or-flight instincts raised.

  She waited, and waited, until she decided it must have been something falling over in the hall. Maybe a small earthquake she hadn’t noticed through her absorption but shook the building enough to dislodge an object.

  There wasn’t anything out of place in the front foyer of the apartment which wasn’t surprising. The sound felt like it had carried through the door.

  She peered out the peephole, but saw nothing other than the plain, drab hallway. She had made sure they didn’t take an apartment higher than the second floor although the ground level would have been better. Becky hadn’t wanted their windows to be at street level and she had a point, but Sara’s fear of heights was a bigger priority.

  With a cautious slowness, Sara pulled open the front door. It swung into the room, and she had to step to the side to avoid getting hit by a large dagger that punctured the metal of the door and hung there.

  “What the hell?” She reached up to it and touched it. It didn’t budge—it had penetrated solidly.

  It was a modern knife with a precision blade and rubberized hilt. Sara knew nothing about weapons, but it had a partially serrated edge and looked like it could do serious damage. It would have taken a lot of strength to drive it through the metal of the door like that—she wasn’t even able to budge it.

  There was a piece of paper pinned to the door underneath the note. It was blank except for two words written in large, bold letters.

  Go Home.

  “Oh my God!” It was a threat. A tangible, visible, physical threat. Startled, Sara looked down the hallway but saw no one. She slammed the door shut and locked it. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  Her breath came in great gasps. “What do I do?” Her mind raced. Should she try to climb down the balcony, escape?

  No, that’s nonsense. It’s more dangerous out there than in here. Whoever left the note is still out there.

  She had received threats related to her work before, but it had been several years and she was in a much more fragile mental state than she had been back when she’d had Michael and an editor she trusted to back her up against anything. Those had been mostly empty threats, made by desperate people. This was a damn knife, thrust into her front door.

  One thing was for sure: she would have to take it down, or else Becky would lose her shit. She might shrug off a hole in one side of the door, but an actual knife sticking out of it was a whole other story.

  The big question is, who left it there?

  She grabbed her phone and sent a message to Derek. She needed to figure out if he was behind this. If so, then she would just go home. Her job and this mystery weren’t worth her life.

  “Yes, Gary, Evan told me you were coming to town. I’m not so sure that’s the best idea. Have you met with Evan? So you’ve heard his warning? I know it sounds like bullshit, but trust me, Gare, he’s onto something. Someone ran me off the road last night, and that doesn’t happen. I’m lucky I didn’t die. It was off those cliffs I took you through the last time you were here, in between the airport and my home.”

  Derek loved his youngest brother, Gary, the most out of anyone he had ever known. Maybe it was because Gary reminded him of Mother, or maybe it was because he’d needed it growing up, but the two had always had a tight bond. Even so, given the current circumstances, he didn’t want Gary anywhere near him. It wasn’t safe.

  “You’ve already landed at the airport? Damn it. No, that’s fine. If you’re already here, then I won’t turn you around and send you back. Just be careful, okay? I’m getting paranoid. I can understand Evan’s point of view now.”

  He hung up the phone and stared at it. He normally would have been overjoyed to host his younger brother, but with the combination of whoever was out to get him and his courtship of Sara, it wasn’t the best timing in the world.

  Sara had asked him if he could meet so she could apologize for her reaction earlier. He’d insisted it wasn’t a big deal, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he gave her the name of his favorite café.

  It was a popular enough spot for celebrities—he wasn’t too out of place. The staff did a good job of maintaining a calm and civilized atmosphere and had a strict no camera policy so the various stars and famous faces could meet and enjoy their lattes or chai teas in relative peace and quiet.

  It helped that the coffee was among the best Derek had ever tasted. He let the complex flavors wash over his tongue, luxuriating in the delicate interplay. It was a simple pleasure, one anyone could enjoy no matter how much money they had in the bank or who their parents were. He wished more people would understand that many of the best things in life came at a low cost, so long as a person took the time to enjoy them fully.

  Sara walked through the front door and peered around for a second. Derek waved to her, but he was back in a secluded corner, and she didn’t notice him. When she whipped out her phone and tapped away, he rose to his feet and cut his way through the intervening tables.

  “Looking for someone?”

  She looked up, startled. “Oh! I didn’t see you there! I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “Not so much, I just got my coffee. I would have ordered for you, but I had no idea what you would like.” He led the way back to their table, careful to cut a respectful distance around the other patrons.

  “Oh, jeez, I don’t even know,” she said. “It smells so wonderful in here, if they could just stick that smell in a cup I’d be more than happy with it!”

  The waitress was at their side almost before they had even taken their seats. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Sara mulled her options, looking over the menu beautifully inscribed with colorful chalk on blackboards around the room. “Maybe a caramel macchiato? That would just about hit the spot.”

  Order taken, the young girl bowed her head and sped away.
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  “So,” Derek said, “long time no see, I suppose.”

  There it was—the magnificent blush he’d become so enamored with. It spread along her cheek like a sunrise, brilliant but fleeting.

  “Yes, Derek, I’m so sorry!” she said. “I really am, I feel like an idiot for ditching you in the middle of the park like I did earlier. That was incredibly rude of me—I’m glad you agreed to meet me again. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want to, you know.”

  Her earnestness was a refreshing change. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she spoke the truth, and that was a very rare occurrence; something to treasure. The way her eyes looked at him beseechingly was impossible to treat with a cavalier attitude.

  “I won’t lie and say it was a comfortable feeling,” he said. “And I’m sure the few photographers following us around had a field day with it. The tabloid covers are likely flying hot off the presses as we speak. That’s not a big deal, though. I’m more worried about you, how you’re feeling. You took the view hard, Sara. Are you okay to be out again, with me? I understand if you aren’t.”

  It wasn’t like him to be so generous with a woman he barely knew, but something in her pulled it out of him. He wanted to know her, protect her. Show her that the world was still a magical place if she let it back in.

  “That’s… not what I expected you to say,” she sighed. “I’m finding it hard to reconcile this part of you, the part I’ve grown to know and admire, with the other image of you. The consummate lady’s man, the ruthless socialite. Are you sure you are this nice of a guy?”

  So she doubted him. It was fair—he couldn’t help but still doubt her. Her appearance just after Evan’s warning and the incident the other night may have been coincidental, but then again, maybe it wasn’t.