Burning Skies (Book 1): The Fall

by Ford, Devon C.

  Climbing into an anonymous-looking dark sedan, she adjusted her seat and mirrors, checked the sun visor for the relevant documentation for her lease of the car, reapplied an additional layer of lipstick, and drove south.

  LIFE IS A MACHINE SET IN MOTION BY MONEY

  Tuesday 2 p.m. – Steakhouse in Albany

  Suzanne Emmerson, formerly of the New York State Department, perused the menu in the steakhouse near the Hudson River as she sipped her vanilla latte and waited casually for her guest. As much as she was dedicated to the cause, to the overthrow of a modern society that was so accepting that it practically welcomed terrorists into their towns and cities, she still enjoyed the small luxuries in life when she had the opportunity. Camp coffee and steak got boring after a while.

  A nervous-looking young man entered clutching a battered leather satchel a little too tightly and scanned the room. Suzanne saw him come in as she had strategically asked the waitress for a booth offering her a clear view of the only entrance and exit. She waited until he saw her and put on a broad, fake smile and waved at him as she stood.

  She disliked the man. He lacked the vision of the men she was used to, and she looked down on him as a man who wouldn’t survive without fast food and internet access. Still, she—they—needed him, so she played nice.

  “Hi!” she exclaimed, maybe a little too happily making up for her distain for the weak man. “How was the drive? How have you been?” she said, making their meeting seem innocuous to anyone who may be listening.

  The man mumbled his responses, sullen and bitter as he had been for so many years that it became his personality.

  The man, Quentin Aaronson, sat but still held tightly to his bag. A look of warning over a smile flashed from Suzanne’s eyes.

  The message was clear: relax.

  He had no idea how her group had found him, how they knew so much about him, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t really care. He had been forcibly ejected from MIT, marched off campus by security, and sent home in shame. Scientific journals, which once heralded him as a genius in the making, now shunned him. He was reduced to returning to his hometown, Boringsville Nowhere, and to a low-paid job repairing electrical items. He was forever known as the boy who threw away a career selling drugs to make his living expenses more manageable. He did not come from a rich or influential family, and nobody spoke up in his defense, so he served two years in a minimum-security state correctional center in Plymouth before returning to his parent’s house, having wasted the most promising years of his life and ruining any future prospects.

  Now, this woman, who had walked into the store where he worked six months ago and offered him money—enough money to really make a difference—was there to collect.

  Ordering herself a salad as a reprieve from the diet of fresh meat she usually lived on, she sipped her second latte and looked at him. He ordered a regular coffee with steak and eggs, well done.

  “You can put the bag down,” she said quietly through her smile as the waitress walked away. Quentin relaxed and carefully placed the bag beside him. He knew it wouldn’t detonate just as well as she did, but the unit he had brought in to show her was still delicate and he didn’t want to damage it.

  “You didn’t have to bring one in here,” she said softly as she looked out of the window and over the highways to where the Hudson River flowed out of sight.

  “I thought you wanted a demonstration?” he said with a smile. He may not feel comfortable in dealing with her and the people she represented, incorrectly assuming that he was supplying arms to an organized crime group, but his wounded pride dictated that he should earn the ridiculous sum of money she was going to give him. She smiled in response.

  They sat in silence until their food arrived, then they ate in silence. Suzanne had no great desire to hear the peevish young man lament about how unfair his life was.

  “Can I get you guys anything else?” asked the annoyingly perky waitress.

  “No thanks, honey, just the check please,” Suzanne answered. She left the table and returned shortly afterwards with a folded piece of paper. Suzanne looked at it, seeing the hand-written thanks signed by Gabby, who had put three kisses on the paper in the vain hope that she would get a bigger tip.

  Suzanne paid the thirty-eight-dollar sum with two twenties, ignoring the attempt to illicit extra cash for someone she saw as simply doing their job. Quentin regarded her quizzically, not that she left such a small tip but more that he rarely saw anyone pay in cash any more.

  “We don’t do plastic,” she told him, understanding his look.

  “Do you do cell phones?” he asked her, retrieving his own from a pocket and holding down a button to switch it off before slipping it, along with his watch and wallet, into a thick bag.

  “No,” she said, “we don’t.”

  “Good,” he said, before wordlessly reaching into the satchel and audibly flicking a switch.

  It was the strangest sensation, to be at the epicenter of a bomb blast without the bomb part. As one, the lights and the music in the restaurant blinked out. The coffee machine, a weaponized array of chrome spouts hissing steam, went slowly quiet. People looked around, checked their dead phones, and the ambient conversation grew louder as people asked what had happened.

  Smiling to each other, Quentin and Suzanne rose from their booth and left. Walking side by side into the parking lot, Quentin pointed to a battered old car which he swore to himself would go as soon she paid him the rest of the money. He opened the trunk with the keys, flicked back a blanket and uncovered a dozen other devices like the one he had used in the restaurant. Nestled in between them was a similar device, only twelve times larger and already seated inside a wheeled suitcase as per her instructions. He handed her a sheaf of paper with the handwritten instructions for the devices and smiled, waiting for his money.

  Suzanne casually glanced around the parking lot. She had intentionally left her rental car in the darkest corner, and now gestured for him to follow her. She hit the key fob and the four-way lights flashed once to indicate that the car was open.

  “It’s in the trunk, tucked right back in a black bag in case I got pulled over,” she told him. His excitement was palpable and he could barely keep his feet still. Half a million dollars was in the trunk of that car, and it was his.

  He was so excited that he didn’t notice the heavy plastic sheeting in the trunk, nor did he have any idea that he poked his head inside where there were no witnesses, and no cameras.

  Silently, Suzanne withdrew her small silenced weapon, a World War II era ‘Hush Puppy,’ from her handbag, pressed the muzzle to the back of his head to minimize the flash in the dying light, and pulled the trigger. She caught his legs as his body slumped and tipped him all the way in, taking the car keys from his pocket in the process. She quickly pulled a heavy trash bag over his head and pulled it tight around his neck, wrapping a strip of tape she had placed on the trunk lid around it.

  Satisfied that the blood and brains wouldn’t leak too much, she shut the trunk and locked the car. She glanced round again quickly, her breath misting in front of her face as she breathed rapidly, and saw that nobody had noticed the interaction. She placed the keys to the rental under the driver’s side front wheel and climbed into Quentin’s car.

  “Fucking lemon, just my luck,” she muttered to herself as she moved the stale-smelling driver’s seat and drove out into traffic.

  An hour north of the city, she pulled in to a rest stop and left the car running. She climbed into the passenger side of the same truck, which had dropped her in town hours before and was chauffeured back to base. There was nothing, not a trace, of her or their involvement in what would be the slow-moving investigation into the disappearance of a nobody with a criminal record for drug dealing. They had never made contact through any electronic means, nothing could be traced to her, and the rental car would be returned wearing its original plates after all forensic traces of the dead body had been removed.

&n
bsp; Behind her, well-spaced and aware of any possible, however unlikely surveillance, drove the dark sedan. The EMP devices, the lemon she had driven and the sedan containing the body of Quentin Aaronson had disappeared from her life, Suzanne didn’t know where to—OpSec—but she had done her part. For now.

  “MOST CITIES ARE VERBS; NEW YORK’S A NOUN.”

  Tuesday 8 p.m – Waldorf Astoria Hotel

  Cal had read that quote by John F. Kennedy written on a wall somewhere before he dragged his suitcase into the grand lobby of the hotel. He was sure his mood had something to do with it, but he simply wasn’t feeling it.

  His anger at doing this alone was killing him; all he had wanted was somewhere hot with a beach, a pool, and a bar. He could have spent two weeks in Spain—all-inclusive—for less than this hotel had cost him for five days. That had been Angie’s fault too. She had demanded they have a city break in New York for their honeymoon so she could shop and he could see the sights, and now she was nowhere to be found.

  So there he was alone in New York and feeling, not for the first time, like a young Macaulay Culkin only without the fun.

  He paused as he entered, marveling at the immaculately patterned carpets, the acres of dark wood and golden gilt detailing on the high ceilings. A uniformed bell hop sprang forward to reach for his case with an expectant smile. Looking every part the tourist, Cal walked toward the shining reception desk being followed by his luggage where a woman in a uniform, which looked more expensively tailored than the wedding suit he never got to wear, smiled at him.

  “Hi there, sir” she said. Her name badge said she was called Bridget.

  “Hi,” Cal replied, feeling boorish and underqualified to be there. “I have a reservation. Owen Calhoun?”

  “Sure thing, sir,” Bridget answered, her smile still sparkling at him. “Just let me check the system.” Cal waited as she tapped at keys efficiently, stealing another glance around the room and feeling even more out of place as a man probably twice his age walked through the lobby with a stunning girl at least a decade younger than Cal on one arm.

  “Congratulations!” Bridget exclaimed, snapping his focus back to the desk. “I see you’re here on honeymoon, so we’ll bring a bottle of French champagne on ice up to your room shortly,” she went on, still smiling and completely failing to register his teary-eyed look of violence as she also failed to grasp that the guest’s wife was nowhere to be seen.

  “Can I have someone take your bags up to your room Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun …?” she said, trailing away as the smile finally wavered when she registered the look on his face and the obvious lack of a Mrs. Calhoun.

  “It’s just me,” he said, his voice cracking and betraying him. He coughed and started again.

  “It’s just me. There is no Mrs. Calhoun. And all champagne is French, otherwise it’s just fizzy wine,” he said petulantly, finally matching his behavior with his feeling of being out of place.

  Bridget didn’t know what to say, her mouth opening and closing but the public-facing smile still trying hard to stay on point.

  “I …” she began, still smiling but dying under the weight of embarrassment and shame. Cal instantly regretted his harsh words and apologized.

  “I’m sorry. It’s been a tough couple of weeks,” he told her, gaining her condescending sympathy as her ‘happy welcoming smile’ underwent a corporate metamorphosis into ‘dealing with upset guest’ mode.

  “Well,” Bridget said, rebooting and recovering from the mishap “I …”

  “I’ll take it from here, Bridget, thank you,” said a rich, cultured male voice from behind him.

  “Mr. Calhoun,” said the voice, making Cal turn and regard an exceptionally well put together man. He was tall, maybe six two, and had the body of a swimmer with hair graying at his temples like it had been dyed that way to make him seem infinitely wiser in the ways of the world.

  “My name is Sebastian, I am the concierge here.” He placed his left hand on his chest and sketched the smallest of bows, like a man used to greeting people from all over the world. Cal, in contrast to the exquisitely dressed man in front of him, dwarfed in both height and manners wearing scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, held out a hand. Sebastian shook it, holding it in a firm grip and not letting go as he leaned his head to the side to catch Bridget’s eye.

  “Bridget? Perhaps we can switch out that French champagne for a bottle of malt whisky?” he said with a smile, making his orders sound like a polite request.

  “Certainly, Sebastian,” Cal heard Bridget say from behind him.

  “Mr. Calhoun,” Sebastian said, “may I call you Owen?”

  “Nobody calls me Owen,” Cal replied, “call me Cal.”

  “Okay Cal, walk with me?”

  He snapped his fingers and a uniformed bellboy ran forward to take Cal’s bags. Sebastian picked up a key card from the reception desk and walked toward the elevators. Cal, relieved of his luggage which disappeared into a separate elevator, found himself swept along with the smooth man as though caught in his wake.

  “Whereabouts in England are you from?” Sebastian asked him as the doors closed.

  “Home counties,” Cal replied. Realizing that someone in New York likely had no idea what he meant so he added, “South of London.”

  “Surrey or Kent?” Sebastian asked with a small smile, gaining the desired look of astonishment from Cal.

  “Surrey. Most people wouldn’t know that,” he said.

  “Cal, most people don’t make it their business to know where our guests come from,” he said as the doors opened and he stepped out onto more lush, thick carpet.

  Handing the key card over, Cal swiped it over the door of the room. Cal walked inside to find, miraculously, his luggage already in the room and a silver tray bearing a bottle of expensive scotch and a pair of crystal tumblers. Sebastian saw the two glasses and furrowed his brow, no doubt analyzing the performance of his staff and finding fault; providing two glasses was an error in diplomacy, but he recovered it.

  “Allow me,” he said, opening the bottle and pouring two measures. “Welcome to New York City,” he said, raising one of the glasses as he offered the toast to Cal. Unable to resist the ingrained manners of an Englishman, he raised his own glass to return the gesture. Sebastian kept hold of the glass he drank from to subtly remove it from the room as though its inclusion were intentional.

  “I’ll leave you to get freshened up, I’ll be in the lobby until ten pm,” he said as he turned for the door. “I’ll have a reservation made for you at our restaurant, compliments of the Waldorf.”

  With that, Sebastian left. Cal drained the glass, stripped off his travel clothes and moments later stepped under a steaming shower.

  CHANGE THE PLAN, NOT THE GOAL

  Wednesday 7:30 a.m. - Washington, D.C.

  Major Stephen Taylor of the National Guard placed the empty piece of paper over the one crammed with tightly packed text. Using a simple decoding pad was old-fashioned, archaic even, given the level of technology at their disposal.

  Rotating digital encryption keys would allow the different factions of the Movement to speak freely, but the colonel was very specific; the enemy held those encryption keys as much as they did.

  “We keep it old-school, son,” Butler had told him. “Keep those ass-hats guessing.”

  The ass-hats he referred to were predominantly the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention the NSA, the FBI, and local police departments, and those shady sons-of-bitches working for the Department of Defense who answered to nobody but Washington. Taylor had once asked him about the CIA, and the big man had enigmatically told him not to worry about the goddamned CIA with a smile.

  DHS and their seemingly unending powers, however, did concern him. Absolutely no member of the Movement used a mobile device to contact one another. No emails, no text messages, no using any cell phone connected to the Internet. They met face-to-face when they could, and communicated nothing via the airways.

  “We go dar
k, boys,” Butler had said. “Keep them guessing.”

  So they communicated in slow time, with truckers delivering sealed envelopes up and down the country, but slow in this case meant utterly safe, utterly insulated, and utterly anonymous. Even an intercepted message would take some linguistic genius sat at his desk in Quantico months to decipher every possible meaning of the message without an encryption pad, and even if they were successful, the intel would be so old as to be worthless to them anyway.

  Taylor read the message again. He was unhappy, and the colonel was most definitely unhappy, because he had failed.

  Maj. Move past the problem and find a solution. Destroy or disrupt target by any and all means necessary. Time of execution remains unchanged. Make it happen.

  Taylor hated failure. It galled him. He was a professional soldier and he had a duty; a duty to his country, to his commanding officer—of the Movement, not the spineless jerk he had to report to—and above all he had a duty to his men.

  The malfunction and loss of their own ‘pinch’ bomb, of their EMP device, was the fault of nobody but still it had happened. They still had a mission to undertake, they still had a target, but now they would rely on plans B and C. Major Taylor had cautioned Colonel Butler that a backup plan would put civilians in jeopardy, would likely result in casualties, but the mission remained. He knew his men would do their duty, and they were all prepared to break eggs making this omelet.

  His men. They were what mattered most to him.

  His men and women, technically, but the females under his command were the last ones to make a gender distinction, unless to point out that they could kick a man’s ass just as easily as anyone else. His brigade was well trained, and they looked up to him because he looked after them when they felt that their country no longer cared.