Darkness

by Karen Robards

  The flash drive was secured at that moment inside Cal’s belt, which was of the type—offered by travel companies—that had an inside zipper in the back for the concealment of cash and small items. He’d been using it on various jobs for various purposes for years. The thing was so low-tech that it had never been compromised.

  “Just talk me through it,” Cal said, because until he got inside a secure facility he wasn’t putting anything on a computer that he didn’t want the whole world to have access to. Rudy was a great hacker, but there were more just like him. Lots of people out there were looking real hard for Rudy, and one way to look for him, or the information he’d stolen, would be to scan the Web. Cal didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. He got the job he was hired to do done with a minimum of fuss, which was why he kept getting hired.

  “You’re making this difficult.” Rudy frowned at him. Cal shrugged. Rudy sighed.

  “Who created the program?” Cal said.

  Rudy made a face. “I don’t know. What, you think it was signed or something? Whoever it was sold it to the Russkies. Or maybe they just took it. Whatever. From whomever. The point is, it’s out there, and there are people looking to buy it or get hold of it however they can. What happened to Flight 155 is almost foolproof.” He smirked a little. “Without me, it would have been foolproof. Nobody had a clue.”

  Cal thought about that. His first reaction—why not just shoot the plane down, or place a bomb on board and blow it out of the sky?—was followed by a quick and terrifying answer. A missile strike would leave a heat signature; so would a bomb, not just on the plane itself but as a record on the satellites and other sensitive devices that monitored what was going on in the world. Investigators would figure out that the plane had been brought down on purpose, and would go hunting for the perpetrators. There weren’t that many with that kind of capability. The culprits would be identified.

  But if the plane’s own systems were compromised, all investigators would be able to determine was that, for reasons unknown, the plane flew into a mountain.

  Rudy was right: as a method of bringing down a plane, it was almost foolproof.

  The hair rose on the back of Cal’s neck.

  Rudy said, “What makes what I’m selling even more valuable is that there’s chatter it’s getting ready to happen again.”

  Cal sat up straighter. “When? Where?”

  “I don’t know. These kinds of people don’t exactly post up schedules. The talk is coming out of Ukraine. I figure your people are smart enough to track it down.”

  “Tell me how it works,” Cal said through his teeth.

  “All right, jeez. Don’t go getting mad at me. I’m the one who found the thing. I’m the good guy here.”

  “Right.” His voice was dry. “How does it work?”

  “Think of the program as a simple”—Rudy broke off, gripping the arms of his chair while the plane bucked through a pocket of turbulence; as the air smoothed out he continued—“repurposing of any basic remote control program. The program itself is not the trick. The trick is getting it on the plane. In this case, they used a private jet to get within range and then—” Without warning, the plane dropped like it was falling down an elevator shaft.

  Rudy gasped out, “Holy moly!” and hung on so hard that his nails made visible indentations in the soft leather of the armrests.

  As the seat seemed to drop out from under him, Cal grabbed for his armrests, too. Cruise altitude for this segment of the flight was thirty-three thousand feet. No way should there be this kind of turbulence at thirty-three thousand feet.

  Even as he had the thought, the plane shimmied like a belly dancer, then dropped some more.

  “Put your seat belt on and stay put,” Cal ordered, and got up to go investigate. As soon as he opened the private room’s door and stepped into the main cabin, the plane dropped so abruptly that he was almost thrown off his feet.

  Grabbing hold of the nearest seat back, he made his way toward the cockpit. The interior was all plush beige leather and polished teak, with four additional passenger seats facing each other and a couch on the left side. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, Cal looked out the windows to see darkness encroaching on all sides. He frowned. The plane’s rocking and pitching gave him his answer: what he was seeing were storm clouds. The plane was flying through a storm.

  As if in confirmation, a clap of thunder reverberated through the plane. Lightning flashed. Clearly they were right in the middle of a violent weather system. From the way the plane was being buffeted, the wind had to be blowing at least a hundred knots. His ears popped suddenly, giving him incontrovertible evidence that they were descending.

  What the hell?

  The cockpit door was shut. Cal tried the handle: locked. Quickly keying in the code meant to unlock the door, Cal tried the handle again.

  Still locked.

  He tried once more. Same result.

  Christ, had something gone wrong in the cockpit? Were they unconscious in there? Dead? Visions of a cockpit fire, a decompression accident, electrical trouble resulting in some kind of freak electrocution—the gamut of possibilities ran through his head in the space of seconds. He even spared a passing thought for the scenario Rudy had described—a remote takeover of the plane’s controls—only to dismiss it. No entertainment system. No means of access. A remote takeover of the plane wouldn’t have disabled Ezra and Hendricks.

  Thumping the metal panel hard with his fist to let them know he was out there, he pressed the button on the intercom system that connected the cabin to the cockpit, one unit of which was set into the wall right beside the door.

  “Ezra? Hendricks?” His voice was sharp. He could feel tension coiling inside him, feel the strong kick of his heart.

  No answer.

  He tried once more. “You guys alive in there?”

  No answer.

  Shit. Adrenaline spiked through his system. He pounded the door harder. “Ezra? Hendricks?”

  “What’s going on?” Rudy was behind him.

  “I told you to stay put,” Cal flung over his shoulder, looking around for some kind of tool he could use to break the handle off the door, which should, he hoped, at least weaken the lock. In his pocket, attached to his key ring, was a small but effective Leatherman tool. With the handle out of the way and the lock accessible, he thought he could use the tool’s screwdriver to jimmy the locking mechanism. Since 9/11, cockpit doors were practically impregnable. He would have hit this one with everything he had if he’d thought it would do any good. It wouldn’t. The lock was his only chance.

  “There’s a problem. Oh, jeez, I knew there was a problem,” Rudy moaned, wringing his hands. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed. The plane shook and dropped. Rudy staggered and caught hold of a seat back to keep from going down.

  Grabbing a fire extinguisher from its mount on the wall, Cal barked at him, “Stay out of my way. Sit down.”

  The cabin rang with the crash of metal on metal as Cal slammed the case of the fire extinguisher into the handle multiple times in quick succession. By the time the handle popped off, Rudy, collapsed in a seat right behind him, was jabbering what sounded like a prayer, the plane was bouncing and yawing like a boat in high seas, and Cal was drenched in sweat.

  His worst fear was that they were going to run out of time. The plane was heading down, and the clock stopped ticking when it ran into something other than air.

  Steadying himself against the plane’s gyrations with a shoulder propped against the wall, he probed the lock with his small screwdriver.

  It slid into the opening, found what he hoped and prayed was the latch—

  “Damn it, Cal, stand down!” Ezra’s voice boomed at him through the intercom.

  Cal’s shoulders sagged with relief. Whatever the hell had gone down, it was over. Straightening, he braced a hand against the wall for balance and depressed the speaker button.

  “What the hell, man?” he said. He was breathing hard. His
heart was hitting about three times its normal rate.

  “Stand down,” Ezra repeated. “Leave the lock alone.”

  Cal frowned. The plane was still bucking, still descending through what felt like the mother of all storms.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he said into the intercom. He had a bad feeling. A gut-tightening, breath-stealing bad feeling.

  “We’re landing. Sit down, buckle up.”

  “We’re in the middle of the fucking ocean!”

  “We got a better offer for Delgado. Thirty million. You’ll get your cut.”

  It took Cal a moment to process. His finger still on the button, he leaned right up close to the intercom to say, “No. Hell no. Motherfucking hell no.” With each variation of “no” his voice increased in volume until at the end he was shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “It’s a done deal,” Ezra replied. “We got people waiting for him on the ground.”

  Cal heard a click. He knew what that meant: the cockpit side of the intercom had been turned off.

  Curses exploding from his mouth, Cal kicked the door, hammered on it, yelled through it, “You fucking idiots, we’re on a job. What do you think is going to happen if we turn up without Delgado? What are you going to say, you lost him? You think there won’t be hell to pay?”

  Behind him, Rudy whimpered with fear. He babbled, “You can’t do this, you can’t let them do this, jeez, I trusted you. Oh, man, oh, man—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Cal snapped over his shoulder at him, and turned his attention back to the door.

  Feet planted wide apart to try to counteract the plane’s jolting, Cal inserted the tiny screwdriver back inside the broken handle. Bracing a shoulder against the door in an effort to keep himself reasonably steady, he probed the lock.

  “Damn it, Cal, leave it the hell alone,” Ezra boomed at him. Not over the intercom. From the sound of his voice, Cal could tell that he was standing just on the other side of the door.

  “If you think there won’t be blowback for this, you’re a goddamned moron,” Cal roared, manipulating the screwdriver. The blade connected with what he was almost sure was the latch—

  “Get away from the fucking door,” Ezra roared back.

  Cal turned his wrist, jiggled the screwdriver, heard a click, knew he had it.

  Bang!

  Something hit him in the gut with the force of a lightning bolt. Pain blasted through his system, blowtorching his insides, obliterating everything except mushrooming agony. Clapping both hands to its source, which was low on his left side, Cal staggered backward, past Rudy, who was rising to his feet, shrieking as he watched. Flickering lightning cast weird shadows over everything. The plane bounced over the rough air currents like a rock on a pond. Gasping, Cal fell heavily against the wall. As he started sliding down it, as he felt the warm stickiness of his blood bubbling up between his fingers, Ezra yanked the door open and stepped through it. Behind him, Cal could see into the cockpit, see Hendricks at the controls.

  “I told you to stand down.” Ezra’s voice was tight. He held a gun in his hand.

  That was when Cal understood that he’d been shot. Ezra had shot him.

  Their eyes met.

  “You fucking—” Cal broke off to launch himself at Ezra with murderous force. Taken by surprise, Ezra dropped the gun and stumbled back as Cal cannoned into him, knocking him into Hendricks, who was thrown from his chair. Hendricks scrambled around on the steeply tilting floor after the gun, Cal grappled with Ezra, and Ezra got his legs bunched against his chest and mule-kicked Cal, sending him flying backward into the cabin to slam against the wall.

  Ezra was charging him, barreling through the cockpit door with a roar, when the front of the plane blew up. The cockpit, the first small section of cabin, the first two leather seats, Hendricks, Ezra, Rudy—disintegrated before his eyes.

  Boom! Gone.

  A split second later there was nothing around him but air. He would have screamed, but it was as if he’d been sucked into a vacuum. There is no air. He dropped like a brick, plummeting through thunder and lightning and dark, angry clouds.

  Until he slammed into something that felt like concrete and blacked out.

  When he woke up, he was drowning in an icy sea. As he struggled to not die, hope had appeared in front of him in the guise of a woman in an orange boat.

  Now it seemed like hope had deserted him. For sure the woman had.

  He’d be damned if he was going to just lie on this frozen beach and die.

  There was Harley. And his mission.

  He needed just a minute . . .

  In his head, just as he was about to lose consciousness, he once again heard Ezra say of Rudy, “We got people waiting for him on the ground.”

  The harrowing thought he took with him into the dark was: this place, this island, was the only ground around.

  Chapter Eight

  Get up.” Crouching beside him, Gina grabbed his upper arm and shook it. His bicep was iron hard . . . his eyes were closed. His face had a grayish pallor that made him look dead. Icy spray broke over them both even as she shook him again. The waves were getting terrifyingly close. “Get up!”

  His eyes opened.

  “The tide’s coming in. You’ll drown if you stay here.” Her voice was sharp. “You have to get up and walk. We have to go.”

  The wind had taken on a high-pitched keening sound, and daggers of lightning lit up the bay. The sky over the water was black and boiling. The sea was blacker still, ruffled with gargantuan whitecaps that pounded the shore. Snow blew in thick and fast. The air grew colder by the minute, and yet the stranger stayed unmoving on the ground.

  “We have to go,” she repeated urgently.

  He blinked. Snowflakes were caught in his lashes, which were stubby and black. More settled in his hair and landed on his alarmingly slack face. They didn’t melt, which was more alarming still.

  “I can’t carry you.” Gina found herself shouting against the wind. She crouched over him. Her fingers dug into his arm as she shook him once more. “You have to get up.”

  He breathed in with a harsh wheezing sound. His face tightened, hardened. With what she could tell was a tremendous effort, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and from there managed to lurch to his feet.

  “That’s good.” She rose with him, still gripping his arm. He staggered drunkenly, a symptom of progressing hypothermia, she suspected, and she wedged herself beneath his arm to steady him. It draped across her shoulders, hard and heavy and practically immovable, giving her the uncomfortable sensation that she was his prisoner. Shaking off that unpleasant feeling, she grabbed the thick, masculine wrist hanging from her shoulder to steady him and wrapped her other arm around his waist, careful to keep clear of his injury.

  So much for not being stupid, she reflected bitterly. Apparently she hadn’t changed as much as she’d thought.

  Not that she was surprised at herself. From the beginning, in her heart of hearts, she’d known that it wasn’t in her to leave him to die, whether she suspected he might be dangerous or not. The good news was, his condition had deteriorated to the point where he wasn’t in any condition to harm her even if he wanted to.

  She didn’t think.

  In any case, she was just going to see him safe, just going to get him out of the storm.

  “Walk,” she ordered with a fierceness that reflected her anger with herself, and walk he did. He seemed to be having difficulty controlling his legs, she discovered to her dismay. His gait was stiff and clumsy. Supporting him across the gritty, uneven sand was beyond difficult. They tacked back and forth, their forward progress owing much to the force of the wind.

  “Where—to?”

  She could barely hear him over the wind, but—God help her, was that a note of wariness in his voice?

  “Away from the water,” she snapped, with no breath to say anything more. He seemed to accept that, or at least he, too, had no more breath to waste on speech
, because he didn’t reply.

  With him leaning heavily against her, they staggered up the beach. Clearly they weren’t going to make it very far: he was too heavy, the going was too hard, and the storm was blasting in too fast. Already the rising surf lapped almost at their heels. Intermittent bursts of sleet bombarded them along with the snow. Even with her back to the wind, her nose and cheeks were growing numb. She could taste the faint tang of melting snow on her lips. Somewhere she’d lost her snow mask; otherwise she would have used it to protect her face.

  Her clothing kept her from physically experiencing the full extent of how cold and wet he was, but she knew anyway. He was so close she could feel the chill emanating from him. His skin had the grayish pallor of a corpse. He staggered as if each step might be his last.

  Casting desperate looks toward the open fields and necklace of hills that fell away from the beach, she spotted a rocky outcropping rising like a black wall through the gloom. Extending from the base of one of the smaller hills, it sat atop a small rise to their right, maybe half a city block away. It offered the only possibility of shelter she could see, and it had the additional advantage of being on relatively high ground. Like the boat, the tent was small and lightweight, no match for the current extreme conditions even if she was able to stake it—which, given the rocky, frozen ground, it didn’t look like she could do. That being the case, they would need protection from the wind. The outcropping would, she hoped, provide that protection. Its elevation should keep them safe from any storm surge as well.