Flash Point

by Thomas Locke

  He waited until they were seated in the same Starbucks where they had been earlier in the day. He felt extremely tense over what he was about to say. He liked her a great deal. The more he got to know Lena, the more he felt drawn to her on a variety of levels.

  “All right,” Lena said once they were seated. “Tell me.”

  So he did. Brett started at the beginning, described meeting Gabriella at a professional conference and falling head over heels in love with a married woman. He described her ex, the wealthy socialite who had financed Gabriella like he would a trophy racehorse, and how Gabriella’s passionate drive conflicted with her ex’s careless lifestyle. He related how an amorphous group called the Combine had begun tracking them through this same ex-husband. Which led Brett to Reese Clawson, and the villa above Como, and Charlie Hazard.

  There he stopped and sipped from his tea. Taking a break. Drawing in the grim determination required to launch into the next phase of his secret. The dark tunnel he had walked after Gabriella chose Charlie over him.

  Brett faced the rear wall. He stared at the grey paint like he was reading from a scientific journal about the measure of one man’s guilt. He described his hunger to grow beyond Gabriella’s staid and conservative set of experiments. Another sip, and he related his contact with Reese Clawson’s group and their offer of a lab and the freedom to go public. All because he had lost a woman who had never returned his love. Which led Brett to investigate the question of temporal boundaries, and how this had drawn him to the maw of the vortex. How even now he could hear the silent roar, the hungry viciousness.

  Lena’s response was the last Brett would ever have imagined. He did not actually believe it happened, not even after he felt the warm hand settle upon his own.

  The expression she revealed was full of soft compassion. But all she said was, “It’s time.”

  Brett had no idea what she was talking about. Lena rose from the table and lifted her carry-on with the hand not holding his. She led him from the café and down the central aisle and up to where the attendant was greeting the first-class passengers. They walked down the connecting tunnel and into the plane, where an attendant pointed them into the first row. Brett settled by the window because Lena directed him there, placing herself between him and the rest of the plane.

  All without letting go of his hand.

  38

  Lena had always been a sucker for honest men.

  Which made her previous romances absolutely laughable. Her love life was a comic opera of ridiculous moves. If she had taken a gun and shot herself in the heart, the result would not have been much worse. Certainly the pain would not have lasted as long.

  But she refused to let herself dwell on past errors. This trip back to New York was not about her. Relating her own chorus of mistakes would come later. Lena had walked over an invisible boundary by listening to Brett’s admission. She had not known it at the time, of course. But now that it was done, she knew that even if the warning lights had flashed across the airport tarmac, she still would have asked. She still would have listened. And she would still be sitting here, in the plane’s first row, holding his hand.

  She asked, “What about the women before Gabriella?”

  Brett kept his gaze on the hand holding his own, as he had since taking the window seat. As though her grip was the one thing that kept him from falling back to earth. The texture of his sadness had shifted somewhat, still there, but calmer now. Resigned, quiet, steady. The sorrow of a man who had carried this burden for a long, long time.

  He said, “There was only one who mattered. I met her the year I accepted my lectureship. Her name was Steffi. She was a senior at UCSB, film major, daughter of a Hollywood producer. Steffi had heard people say she was beautiful every single day of her life. She was so accustomed to having men try to reshape the world to suit her, she never actually thought about it. Getting everything she wanted came as naturally as sunshine. Until we met. Most of our fights were over how I did not drop everything and run to do her bidding.”

  “She sounds too shallow for you.”

  “That is too simplistic. She was a very good person in many ways. I never did feel comfortable with her beauty. Mostly because I never understood what she saw in me. So many other men chased after her. Richer men more connected to her LA life, more comfortable with small talk and high society.”

  Lena felt hollowed by his calm openness. Her heart was rendered and bruised by the act of listening. She opened her mouth, wanted to offer some form of comfort. But the words did not come.

  “She liked to show up in the middle of the night,” Brett went on. “Laughing and breathless and eager. But there was often the hint of other fragrances. She shrugged off my questions as unimportant. She always said I was a brilliant man doing important things. I needed to accept that sometimes she needed the party, the crowd, the action. What did it matter where she went, so long as she came back to me?”

  Lena whispered, “The problem was, you loved her.”

  “It was a fatal error, falling for her like I did. Finally I broke it off. She was not hurt so much as astonished. And angry. No man had ever done that to her before. That was the line she repeated. Day after day. No man had ever left her.” His smile was tragic. “So what do I do, after two years of solitude, but fall for Gabriella. Who was everything Steffi was not. A fellow scientist. Brilliant. Stable. Deep. Perceptive. Wise. Caring.”

  “And married,” Lena murmured. “And in love with another man.”

  “I knew Charlie Hazard was a threat from the first time I laid eyes on him. Even before, actually. When Gabriella returned from an ascent where she had been shown where to meet him, she glowed. I was jealous of him a week before we even met.”

  Lena asked, “What about now?”

  “You mean Charlie?” His smile was a Kabuki mask. “He is the best friend I’ve ever known.”

  Forty-two minutes later they landed at LaGuardia. As the plane taxied, Lena said, “I don’t think you should be alone tonight.”

  A tension gripped his features, turning the skin around his mouth and nostrils parchment-white. He breathed in, not so much shaky as broken.

  Lena felt awkward now that the thought was spoken aloud. “I mean, you know, as friends.”

  “I understand, Lena.” He spoke to the same point on the wall before his face. “It’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a very long while.”

  39

  The instant Reese woke up, she realized she was back inside the cage.

  The sounds came to her first, which was typical. The prison’s noise always filtered through whatever dream ended the night. The shouts were predator calls, the shrieks and screams of marauding beasts hunting their next prey. Then she opened her eyes, and instantly she knew where she was. Somehow they had transported her back to Raiford, the first prison where she’d been held.

  Her gut tensed with the rigid fear she had never allowed herself to reveal. The Raiford women’s section had been dominated by two gangs, one Latino and the other African American. The Anglos had mostly been from Ukraine and Belarus, three drug-running crews who had been taken down in a series of stings. The Eastern European women hated each other with a stubborn viciousness that Reese considered idiotic. It was like watching the Soviet version of the Hatfields and McCoys. The other two prison gangs took advantage of their hatred and controlled the pen. Life for solitary beings like Reese was terrible. She had only stayed in Raiford for seven weeks. She left convinced that one more week would have seen her laid out on the coroner’s slab.

  And now she was back. She recognized the Cyrillic script scrawled across the ceiling above her bunk. Her first cellmate had been from Minsk, a ruthless madam who used smuggled cell phones to run her string of girls from inside the pen. Two weeks after Reese arrived, the woman had been knifed in the yard. Now Reese lay with her eyes clenched shut, trying to remember who had taken the woman’s place. But her mind was blank. It probably meant she had been drugged and transport
ed while zonked out. According to prison lore the feds used that sometimes as a means to extract confessions.

  Reese tensed and sprang from the top bunk, from prone to crouched in the middle of the cell, empty hands extended like claws.

  The lower bunk was empty. The mattress was rolled up in a tight ball. Reese looked around. The shelf for a second inmate’s personal belongings was bare. She had the cell to herself.

  Which made no sense at all.

  The morning claxon sounded and the cell door opened. Reese stepped carefully into the passageway. She expected to confront jailhouse snarls and women wearing gang paint. Reese was the new meat. They would measure, they would challenge. A fight was inevitable.

  The passage was empty.

  Reese’s cell was on the third floor. The left-hand wall was a wire cage that overlooked the rectangular pen, with the rec benches and the concrete floor far below. The smell was overpowering, a wretched mix of disinfectant and human misery and blood not yet spilled. Reese took a slow look around, confused and uncertain. The noise was precisely as she remembered, the shouts and screams so loud she could not make out any actual words. But there was no one. Not a guard, not an inmate, nothing.

  She started toward the door at the end of the aisle because she had no idea what else to do. She feared she might be marked down as late, which meant ten days in solitary. But she had moved as soon as the claxon blared and the door opened.

  Reese walked the stairs alone, every nerve in her body on full alert. Being alone was a high-risk event, to be avoided at all times. Such isolation was usually arranged in advance, and always resulted in a severe beating or death. Reese heard her own breathing—tight, keening pants, an animal knowing she is being hunted, searching for safety, finding none.

  She reached the ground floor, crossed the central pen, and walked the corridor leading to the cafeteria. The noise grew to where it pounded on her from all sides, battering her as strong as fists. Then she entered the cafeteria, and she froze.

  The chamber was ten times larger than the prison’s cafeteria. It was jammed full of beasts.

  The creatures that had partly emerged with Heather’s and Esteban’s return. They were here. Hundreds of them. Every manner of horrible shape, heaving, surging, roaring.

  Then they saw her. They wheeled about and crouched and bared their fangs. And roared at her with one voice. Delighted. Hungry. Vengeful.

  They pounced.

  Reese screamed. She tore from the bed, fighting the sweaty tangle of sheets like chains. She raced blindly across the unfamiliar apartment. She slammed into a chair, came up fighting. She flung it at the wall, still screaming.

  Then she realized where she was.

  When her heart finally calmed and her gasping whimpers ceased, Reese realized not a single member of her team had come by to check on her. Those screams should have brought the house down.

  Reese crossed the room. She picked up the chair and set it down on its remaining three legs. She unlatched her door and stepped into the hall.

  A dozen or so faces were there. All of them held to the exact same watchful caution. The voyagers crouched just inside their apartments, only part of each face visible. Showing just enough to observe. Ready to slam the door and retreat.

  Reese asked, “This happens a lot?”

  A voice from midway down the hall said, “Not every night.”

  “Often enough,” another said.

  Reese looked at them. Her rage was a bomb just begging to go off. But not at them. She said, “I’m okay. Go back to bed.”

  She shut her door. Crossed to the sliding doors and opened them and stepped onto the balcony. The night breeze felt good against her clammy skin. She stared up at clouds turned into silver ships by the moon and whispered, “This stops now.”

  Only when she had worked out her plan of attack did she return inside.

  40

  At dawn Reese phoned Kevin, surprised to learn he was already in his office. She showered and dressed and returned to the glass cube. Kevin made coffee, then took his mug over to the front window. Beyond the glass wall traffic already hummed, mostly pickups and the hard-used vehicles of hourly workers. Reese had come over hoping to do some forward thinking. But Kevin seemed distracted, so she began by reviewing the previous day’s events. As she spoke she studied the man who was as close to a friend as she could probably come these days. Kevin did not look like he had slept at all. The hand holding his mug shook slightly. When she stopped talking, he remained as he had been throughout, watching the traffic and drinking from his mug.

  Finally Reese said, “I want to walk back through what we discussed yesterday. From the very beginning.”

  He did not turn from the window. “This is about handling the midnight crew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good name, by the way.” He waved his mug at her reflection. “Shoot.”

  “The mystery people hiding behind Vera found you and brought you in. You developed a basic method using this new technology. You signed up your first team. But your initial outings kept losing voyagers to comas. Just like we faced the last time we worked together. Then one of the four midnight crew hooked up with the beasts.”

  His words fogged the window in front of his face. “It was the guy with all the metal. Soon as I saw that first transformation, I knew I couldn’t handle them. But we’d lost nine voyagers up to that point. Then the four made that connection to the monsters, and within a week all the coma victims had woken up. None of them fully recovered. We use them on the front desk now, and in the café. The important thing is, we haven’t lost another since then.”

  Reese didn’t like how Kevin was taking this. He seemed to find the traffic below his window more interesting than Reese’s team. The man looked exhausted. And stressed. “Did you know the midnight crew has been extorting payment from the other voyagers?”

  “Yes. That started the day before Vera finally agreed to bring you in. I had sent Vera a video of that moment when the beast appeared after a voyage.” He set his mug on the desk, then went back to watching the traffic. “What makes somebody willing to get swallowed like that?”

  “I think our four like that taste of danger. They like the power. The dark doesn’t scare them like it does most people.” When he did not respond, she pressed, “Tell me what’s wrong, Kevin.”

  He tapped the glass with one hand. “They’ve murdered the old man.”

  “What?”

  “John Beadle. Head of the scopes division. The official line is, he’s suffered a stroke.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I flag all the groups we’re tasked to investigate. A news agency sends me an alert anytime there’s a development. I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out our next move. But I can’t get beyond the fact that we’re working for a bunch of cold-blooded killers.”

  “Come over here and sit down.”

  He stayed where he was, tapping the glass. “Before, I thought, you know . . . all three targets so far have been military suppliers. Maybe Defense Intel decided to establish an outside group they could monitor and control.”

  Reese had thought the same thing. “Kevin. Please.”

  He slouched across the carpet and sighed into the chair opposite her. “DOD wouldn’t murder a company exec to gain control. Not and put a criminal in his place.”

  “That’s not the question we need to focus on here.” She rapped the table with her knuckles and waited until Kevin lifted his gaze. “Vera and her group will assume we know.”

  Kevin stared at her.

  “They’ll gauge our response very carefully. If we don’t react the way they want, they’ll take us out.”

  “We’re expendable.”

  “Of course we are. That’s why we’ve been thinking about hunting them down. So we can know when to run.” She leaned across the table. “I need you to focus.”

  He straightened in his seat. Or tried to. “I’m listening.”

  Reese worked out h
er strategy as she spoke. By the time she finished, Kevin’s gaze had cleared. He still looked exhausted. But he was with her. “That could work.”

  She leaned back, satisfied and troubled at the same time. “Get Vera on the phone.”

  “We want a million dollars,” Reese said. “Cash. Now.”

  Kevin’s shoulders were bunched beneath the starched shirt. His gaze shifted between the speakerphone and Reese. Back and forth. Nervous as a cat.

  Vera said, “Your Bridgeport contracts only netted three mil.”

  The tension was electric, but now it was all good. Reese had no problem with pressure. Stressing a situation had always brought her pleasure, so long as she was in control. Vera’s response was all she needed to hear. She gave Kevin a tight smile. They were running in the green.

  Reese said, “Our project is a whole lot bigger than a couple of jobs. Isn’t it.”

  Vera did not reply.

  “The contract payments we negotiated with that company were icing on the cake. It covers our costs. That’s all—”

  Vera interrupted with, “Break down this number of yours.”

  “For starters, two hundred and fifty each for Kevin and me.”

  “Your annual salary as bonus? You’re out of line even suggesting such a thing.”

  “Two fifty each,” Reese repeated. “For every successful project.”

  Vera went silent.

  “Another two fifty to be split evenly among all the voyagers. Everyone gets something.”

  Vera did not respond.

  “The final two fifty is for contingencies.”

  “Explain.”

  Reese pointed across the table. Kevin said, “You recall the video I sent.”

  Vera did not reply.

  “The threat this represented has increased. Reese has worked out a possible means to overcome this. We want to reward—”

  “All right. Hold on.”