by Jeff Abbott
‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A gadget that could track you. Like I’m going to recognize that.’ He risked a grin and she smiled, barely, back.
‘Or blow us up. Aren’t I Mary Sunshine?’ Exhaustion cramped her voice.
Luke slid out from under the car. ‘I don’t see anything there that looks totally foreign.’
‘All right.’ They got in; she drove into the dark street.
‘Where to?’
‘Some place we can plan. I need sleep.’ Luke’s fatigue was overwhelming. His body had no adrenaline left. He felt like he had been running forever.
‘Someplace cheap,’ she said.
‘Someplace cheap,’ he agreed.
‘Eric lied about his whole life,’ she said unexpectedly, and tears spilled from her eyes. But not sobs. The tears were steady and controlled and she wiped them off her cheek with the back of her hand. She kept driving and Luke didn’t know what to do until he put his hand over her hand on the steering wheel. Just for comfort.
Neither of them noticed the traffic camera perched on the closest intersection, watching them with its uncaring eye as they pulled away from the curb and drove into the darkness.
26
Snow slept in the motel bed, exhausted from her mending shoulder and her ill-advised murder. Mouser opened his laptop and took a walk along the Night Road.
He felt lonely much of the time but signing onto the Night Road’s private website was like slipping into a warm bath. Happiness, comfort, knowing you belonged. It was a rare sensation for him.
It was not a single website, but rather a fortress of several linked sites, hosted on a Russian server. The sites appeared innocuous – even boring – until you entered a password, and their delights opened up to your eyes. You could not get a password without being cleared by Henry Shawcross. Very few in the Night Road could name, by true identity, another member. He glanced at Snow; he still didn’t know her real name. It was better that way.
He sighed, with relief and pleasure. He read the fresh postings on the site – encoded in Night Road parlance. Celebrations and congratulations on the oil pipeline explosion in Canada. Disguising it as an accident, a Night Road member had managed to inflict millions in economic damage to both Canada and the United States for the tiny investment of five thousand dollars for plastique and transportation costs. Electronic versions of high fives floated in the postings. The E. coli meat poisoning scare from the Tennessee food plant was also mentioned as a triumph, the combined work of two members who hadn’t known each other before being introduced via the Night Road and had pooled resources and knowledge to infect the processing plant and send a wave of panic across American tables. Low cost, high impact.
A select few, proven the most capable, would take part in Hellfire.
He moved past the accolades. Someone in Alabama wanted training in explosives and wanted a new source for firearms. A man in Los Angeles was looking for other groups to network with to disrupt highway traffic on the 4th of July. Another poster in Belgium had lifted a large number of credit card account numbers from a US Army depot and was selling them.
Mouser paused at one posting – a British hacker had dispersed a Trojan horse via a porn site out of St Petersburg and the Trojan had begun a rapid propagation around the world; the hacker announced he was ensnaring a thousand unsuspecting PCs a day. The Trojan malware would serve up all passwords and credit card information stored on the infected computers. Blocks of one hundred systems were available for sale; bidding was intensifying.
Mouser considered. He’d funded his last three operations against the Beast – ammunition, travel and lodging – by buying a block of infected systems. It was like buying a mutual fund; some hijacked systems could deliver hugely profitable information; others – usually owned by teenage boys – would produce slim to none. But nice clean identity and account information was valuable – and, given how badly the past couple of days had gone, he and Snow might need clean names to step into, for a short while. Until the dust settled. And if the payments he’d been promised fell through, then he could use the financial info to resell down the chain. He knew of Serbian crime rings and one ever-desperate Muslim terror cell in France who would buy nearly anything.
Mouser put in a bid on two blocks of machines and then posted his own request.
Need access to Creeps full-blowns for P24. Only 2. 1 GPS.
In Night Road parlance, he was asking for access to all credit card databases for charges paid in the past twenty-four hours, for two names, and GPS information for one car – Aubrey’s. He waited.
Five minutes later, a voice elsewhere in the world replied:
Might can do. Offer?
Mouser responded: Can trade skills in US.
‘Skills’ was a code word for kills – he was offering to kill someone in exchange for the data he needed.
The reply: Not in US. Sorry. Good luck.
Then another offer appeared: I can help. Post details at skeech@netter. net
This email address was an established blind – clicking on it took you to a legitimate computer website, a discussion group for American movies and TV shows owned by one of the same holding companies that owned Travport Air Cargo. The discussion group was in Malaysia, and the postings ranged from fluent English to Malay to badly broken English – perfect for shorthand cues. The site was again hosted out of Russia and when needed, postings by Night Road members were automatically purged from the system. It was not perfect anonymity but it was close.
He slipped into the forum, created a new user ID, and signed on. He posted a new topic, asking in broken English about an upcoming DVD release with the word skills in it. A moment later another poster responded with a long answer written in a motley, text-message style shorthand.
They chatted, continuing the camouflaged dance, until the respondent gave an encoded answer that contained a phone number with an area code in New Mexico.
Mouser called the number.
It was answered on the third ring. ‘I’m your new friend,’ Mouser said.
‘I can get your information.’ The voice was baritone, Spanish-flecked, tobacco-hoarse. ‘But it will take a few hours.’
‘I need it now.’
‘Your need is irrelevant. It will still take a few hours.’
Mouser sighed. ‘And you can guarantee continuous reading of the car’s location.’
‘Until my path into the database is discovered. No guarantees. But you should get a solid read on where your target is.’
‘Who do you want handled as payment?’
‘You take out a cop and we’re square.’
‘You mean just any cop at random?’
Mouser considered. Police officers were servants of the Beast. It was strangely thrilling to know a police officer was going about life, unaware that he or she would soon die so Mouser could buy information. ‘All right.’
‘What’s your car registrant’s name?’
‘Aubrey Perrault. She drives a Volvo, license plate F52-TJR, Illinois. Tonight she would have been parked in Lincoln Park, off Armitage.’
‘I have a friend who has a back door into most of the major metropolitan traffic camera feeds. I can see if she’s popped up anywhere in Chicago in the past few hours – it would help narrow the search – and contact you via the site.’ They would not use these phones again with each other; they were prepaids, to be destroyed and disposed of when their business concluded.
Mouser thanked him and clicked off the phone. He signed off the Malaysian site and returned to the Night Road site. So many people, each with their own agenda, their own skills, their own cause, trading their brilliance and their resources, ready to strike against the far wider world. An army, hidden in the shadows, and waging a war that would change the world. A Night Road, built by Henry Shawcross out of the bricks given to him by Luke Dantry. A scary, and a beautiful, creature, a beast of justice, was being born.
> With Hellfire as its birth announcement.
Out of his window, Mouser looked up into the starry sky and wondered if he could see the GPS satellite far above, which would tell his new buddy exactly where Aubrey and Luke were. He wanted to blow the distant eye a kiss.
27
Luke and Aubrey drove to a small chain motel on the outskirts of Chicago, on Interstate 55 toward St Louis, and checked in – one room, two beds. Aubrey paid cash; Eric had given her money that afternoon, since they couldn’t use credit cards.
Exhaustion threatened to swamp Luke’s brain but he sat on the bed and studied the list of states, banks and accounts. He didn’t know where to start. There were no names on the accounts, no passwords, no identifiers beyond Eric’s notes. Any other information he needed had died with Eric. And if these were the closed accounts – they were useless. Unless they could give him hints about which Night Road member each account was intended for. Presumably these people were scattered around the country, like Snow and Mouser. The bank with their Night Road funds would have to be close to them. It might help find them.
Aubrey showered behind the closed door and he kept his back to the bathroom. He lay down and fell asleep almost instantly. In his sleep he stood and he was back on his father’s flight. The man who had sabotaged the plane was gone, but he could see, from behind, his father’s body, slumped by a window.
Dad, he called. His father’s hand lay on the frosted window, the silver Saint Michael’s medal dangling between his fingertips.
He touched his father’s shoulder.
Turning, standing, the dead man was not Warren Dantry but Henry, his face blue, his lips gray, reaching for Luke’s throat.
Luke sat up, mouth dry, skin clammy with sweat. Aubrey, fully dressed again, hair wet, sat watching him from the other bed. She had turned on the television and as he looked at the screen he saw the pictures of the two men killed in the alley. Chris and the poor officer.
He reached for the remote, turned up the volume. No arrests in the double shooting. No suspects as of yet.
‘I’ll be back.’
He walked down four streets and at a busy intersection, found an ancient pay phone in front of a convenience store. But it was too close. He took a bus a few miles away, found another convenience store with a pay phone. He fed it quarters and dialed the police, said quickly and clearly, ‘I called in earlier the tip on the murdered officer. The two people responsible for shooting him may also have a connection to the train bombing in Texas, and they are working on a bigger attack called Hellfire, but I don’t know what it is.’ He hung up. He could have said something about Henry; he hadn’t. Why? He owed Henry no loyalty. But his mouth had not been able to form the words, to say what he believed about Henry as an absolute truth. He picked up the phone to dial it again, then slowly hung up.
He knew the awful truth: he wanted to deal with Henry himself. He wanted Henry weak and vulnerable in front of him, to be forced to admit he used and betrayed Luke. Accountable, for only a few moments, to Luke for taking Luke’s well-intentioned work and building an obscenity from it. It was a disquieting realization, and it gnawed at his heart during the trip back to the motel.
When he got back to the motel room, Aubrey had turned to another news channel. Authorities in Alaska were reporting that a trio of Seattle men had been arrested trying to sabotage an oil pipeline near Sitka. They had been caught with a few homemade bombs, devices powerful enough to have torn an expensive hole in the pipe and shut down delivery capacity for days. The men were allegedly ecological extremists; but the stock market had reacted to this late-afternoon news with a feeling of havoc narrowly averted, especially after the week’s earlier pipeline blast in Canada. Oil prices soared to new records and the rest of the market cratered for the day. Millions vanished on paper.
‘Seattle,’ Luke said. ‘I found some extremist environmentalists in Seattle that I handed over to Henry. This could be them.’
‘Or not.’
‘I can’t hear about an attack, or a political crime, and not think it’s connected to the Night Road right now. My God, I gave him so many names. Even if there were only fifty or so that were serious, that’s a million per terrorist.’
‘Life has a soft underbelly,’ Aubrey said. ‘I mean, if just a few people wanted to wreck the economy, they could, with surgical precision. Just by hitting us where we’re vulnerable. Our energy. Our food. Our communications.’ She looked at him, sadness in her eyes. ‘If they scare enough people, they will change how we live.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Look at 9/11, what a few people can do with so little. Nineteen guys. The whole operation cost a half-million. These guys could cause so much more suffering with so much more money. Not just one big attack. Maybe a whole, long series. An onslaught of terror.’
Then the next story was about Eric but they did not mention Eric’s name. The screen showed police tape cordoning off the condo building on Armitage. No witnesses, no description of a shooter, except three people – a man and a woman, pursued by another man – had run into traffic, nearly causing a major bus crash. The anchor said, ‘We’re told the power across the Lincoln Park area had failed due to a computer glitch, although no problems elsewhere in the power grid have been reported, and ComEd is investigating the situation…’
She smoothed her damp hair back from her head. ‘You sort of stink, Luke. You might want to shower.’
He hadn’t gotten clean since the cottage near the flooded river. He ducked into the bathroom, stood under the stinging spray, lathered his body with soap. A warm gratitude dawned in his chest that she was sticking with him; he didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t like putting his grimy clothes back on but he had no choice. He’d lost his knapsack with his clothes at Chris’s studio.
Aubrey lay curled under the sheets. Dozing. He moved to his own bed and doused the light. He realized he’d left the bathroom light on. He got up, switched off the light and walking in the darkness back to his own bed, he inadvertently hit his shin against her mattress.
She sat up with an abbreviated scream.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Aubrey.’
‘I’m okay. I thought – I dreamed I was back in that cabin…’
‘It’s okay.’ He sat on his bed. ‘I had a bad dream earlier.’ He could hear, in the dark, the rustling of the sheets on her bed as she eased back down on the mattress.
She said, ‘I was sure – when I was chained to that bed – no one was ever going to find me. I was going to starve to death. Or die of thirst. An ugly death alone. I don’t even like to eat lunch alone.’
He laughed, very softly, and she sighed and then she cried, for Eric, for the life he’d stolen from her.
Luke watched the moonlight that came in the room from the barely parted curtains. He looked over at Aubrey and for a moment he didn’t realize that she was holding a hand out toward him.
He took her hand.
‘Just for now,’ she said. He knew. He understood.
‘I thought I was going to die in that cabin, too,’ he said. He closed his hand around hers. His breath seemed to pause. She drew him to the bed. They nestled together, both hungry for warmth, both exhausted, hearts and minds tattered by crisis.
Then her mouth turned to his, needy, hungry, a kiss that said I’m just so thankful to be alive. He covered his mouth with hers, slowed the kiss, broke it. Her lips tasted of coffee.
‘Bad idea,’ he said.
‘I don’t care. I’ve been living a bad idea for days. I didn’t love him any more. He’s ruined my life. I can’t… I just need…’
He knew. The need to feel alive, to not be deadened by the horror. She withdrew from the kiss, almost shy, and then he touched the hem of her T-shirt, felt her lift her arms, wanting to be free from the fear. He tugged the shirt off her head and eased off her bra. He pulled off his own shirt and leaned in close to kiss her again. The silver of the Saint Michael’s medal touched her naked breasts.
‘What’s this?�
� She fingered the medal, the angel’s wings.
‘Saint Michael. My dad gave it to me before he died. He’s supposed to keep me safe, he said.’ Aubrey studied the medal in the cold bar of moonlight from the window, cupping it in her palm, then she ran the medal along the silver chain and put the angel on Luke’s back.
‘It tickles me,’ she said.
‘Okay.’ She closed her eyes and Luke felt her fingertips begin to push his boxers from his hips.
The lovemaking was gentle and comforting and good and they both slipped into warm sleep. In the deep of the night Luke awoke at the sound of a door shutting down the hall. He thought he should stay awake, stay on guard in case Mouser and Snow worked more sick magic to find them but he knew they couldn’t, that he and Aubrey were safe, they were invisible. But he stayed awake for a long hour, thinking not of the woman curled in the shelter of his arms, sleeping in abject relief of momentary safety, but of Henry.
Thinking of what he would do when he saw Henry, the king of lies, the false face, the betrayer, the serpent who could say trust me and turn the words to poison.
Luke was steeling himself, he realized, for murder.
28
They both slept until late in the morning, the sunshine crafting through the windows. Luke awoke and she lay next to him, watching him.
‘Shouldn’t have,’ she said, but she offered a shy smile. He saw what he thought was regret in her eyes. She blinked it away, as if she knew it lingered, and gave him a warm kiss on the mouth, followed by a chaste kiss on the forehead. She kept her hand on his flat stomach. ‘But I’m not sorry that we did.’
‘Shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I have no regrets either.’
‘You’re a good guy.’
‘So are you. Not a guy. But good.’ He had never been deft at the morning-after chatter and he saw he wasn’t improving now. He felt a pang of regret, because this was going to change or complicate an already tough situation between them. He couldn’t deal with another problem. But if he was going into battle, he wanted her: a smart and brave partner.