Jack yawned.
“You’re experiencing doubt,” she said.
“Incisive.”
The next card depicted eight golden goblets arranged in a pyramid.
“You’re not happy with your current situation.”
“Really, is anyone these days?”
She ignored his barb and turned over the third card in his reading. Seven swords.
“Aah,” she said, laying a long, bony finger against her thin, hard lips.
“Betrayal.”
It was an illusion, a trick, but it still made his stomach flip a little.
“But not like you think,” she said. “You must stay the course. You must follow through to the end.”
The crunch of leaves and gravel behind him broke his fixation on the Betrayal card, on this strange woman. He turned to see two men approaching him. They were dressed like the two sentinels at the gate. He had not seen them during his reconnaissance of the Market’s midway.
“Afternoon,” Jack said.
“A word please?” said one of the men. He was young, blond-haired, handsome. The other one was a little older and a lot dumber looking. Jack could have both men’s guns in his back pocket before the woman got through the next card.
“But we’re not through with his reading!” she exclaimed loudly.
“Fuck off, hag,” the second man said.
“It’s terrible luck to interrupt a reading,” she shrieked. “You cannot interrupt a reading!”
“I said fuck off!” he barked.
“That’s no way to speak to a lady,” Jack said. “Apologize.”
The first man reared back to pistol whip Jack, but he telegraphed his move. Jack’s hands flashed like lightning, snatching the gun from the other man’s grasp before he knew what was happening. Jack turned the gun on both men. One stared dumbfounded at his own gun pointed at him.
“Now apologize and I will come quietly,” he said. “I’ll even give you your gun back.”
The two men glanced at each other, humiliated.
“Fine,” they said, one after the other.
“Sorry, lady.”
“I can finish your reading now,” she said to Jack.
“Another time,” he replied. He handed the gun back to the man.
The pair escorted Jack outside the Market to a small campsite on the northern edge of the town square. Three large tents sat near the tree line, six-man if Jack gauged their sizes right. In the center were the remains of a campfire.
“Sit down,” the man said, pointing to one of the chairs arranged in a semicircle around the fire.
Jack complied.
“You’re from Promise,” the man said.
“I am.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I know,” he said. “But I needed to talk to you folks.”
“Why?”
“I have information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Valuable information.”
“What kind of valuable information?” the first one snapped, a hint of annoyance in his voice.
They were getting impatient, which delighted Jack to no end. These two were like anyone else, anxious to get their paws on the newest juicy gossip. Their lives were boring, monotonous most of the time. This encounter with Jack was likely the highlight of their month. And he had just sweetened the pot.
“Where’s Joshua?” Jack asked.
“Not here.”
“Where is he?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Who’s his boss?”
“Joshua’s the boss.”
“The hell he is.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Guys,” Jack said, leaning back in his chair, spreading his arms wide. “Let’s not dick around here.”
Joshua was a lieutenant, no more. He was definitely a superior to these two idiots, but he wasn’t the man behind the curtain. Joshua was on the road more often than he wasn’t. The Haven’s operation was too big, too complex for its architect to be on the road seven days a week. There were probably ten Joshuas.
“How about you tell us, and we’ll tell the boss?”
“How about no?”
The man who’d cursed out the card reader drew his gun and pointed it at Jack’s head. Jack didn’t even blink. The man was not going to shoot him. Such a decision was above his paygrade.
“Believe me, your boss is gonna want to know about this,” Jack said calmly. “But if you kill me, you’ll never know it. Until it’s too late, that is.”
“Zach,” the second man said. “We need to take this up the chain.”
Zach huffed and lowered his weapon.
“You try anything, and I’ll kill you.”
“Fair enough.”
22
Breakfast arrived early in the morning. He had no idea what time it was, as there were no windows in the cell, and the cell block itself may as well have been buried at the Earth’s core for as much light as he had down here.
Calling it breakfast was a bit generous, but it looked to provide Jack with some minimal nutrition. A stale piece of flatbread and a mealy apple about the size of a baseball. He ate the food quickly, not wasting his time on the taste. Food was fuel, nothing more, nothing less. Before the Pulse, he’d never understood America’s obsession with food. Taking pictures of it and posting it online, dear God in heaven. That was one positive byproduct of the Pulse, he had to admit. Gone were the days sitting in a restaurant and taking a picture of your food before you ate it. Amen, hallelujah.
He’d been in here for three days, and no one had come to talk to him. The cell was similar to the one they had back at Promise, albeit a little smaller and a little danker. Whatever. He’d spent many nights in holes far smaller and danker than this one. But the plan was still on track. The first phase had gone off without a hitch, as the thugs back at the Market had bought his story hook, line, and sinker.
After agreeing to take him back to the Haven, they had slung a blindfolded Jack onto Zach’s horse like a sack of flour. They rode for several hours, although Jack suspected they had ridden in circles and retraced their steps to disorient him as much as possible. It was not a bad move, smarter than he would have given these two clowns credit for.
“How much farther?” Jack had asked. He’d wanted to test them.
Zach threw an elbow into Jack’s ribcage, taking his breath away.
“Keep your damn mouth shut.”
They rode through thick forest and across dry creek beds, the journey piercing late into the afternoon. A strong squall caught them during the middle of their ride. The sky blackened, and sheets of rain poured down on them. The horses remained calm, thankfully enough. Eventually, they came upon a small cabin in the woods. It appeared to be their final destination for the evening. Dammit. This was not their headquarters. It was more likely a place for them to torture him, find out if he was hiding anything.
No matter. Jack had been tortured before. He had never broken. It was part of his counterintelligence training in the Army. And these two didn’t look like they knew the first thing about extraction. But as it turned out, this was just a rest stop. They stopped for a bathroom break, restocked their supplies, and kept moving. He was relieved. He could handle whatever pain these yahoos could inflict on him, but he wouldn’t be able to kill them. Otherwise, the whole operation would be ruined.
They turned onto a two-lane road and followed that for a few more miles. Based on the steady clock of the horses’ hooves on the pavement, the road felt fairly smooth. They crossed a bridge. Although he could not see it, Jack could hear the water flowing beneath them, the rush of the breeze across the bridge. The outskirts of a small town. Jack tried to picture it in his mind, aware that reality would match nothing that he imagined. Still, his mind fought to create a picture of a thing he could not see. Ruins of an abandoned strip mall. Perhaps it had burned in the hours immediately following the Pulse. A small fire that b
urned out of control when no firefighters had come to extinguish the blaze.
Now his mind drew a small downtown area fronted by empty ghost buildings. Maybe the courthouse or a dry cleaner or a local newspaper office. The storefronts would be missing their plate-glass windows, shattered in the chaos of the post-Pulse world.
They turned left and maintained that heading for another half hour, forty-five minutes. They had done a good job blindfolding him, he had to give him that, and he had lost total track of time. He was annoyed with himself; it was something he was normally good at. Oh well, even a blind squirrel found a nut from time to time.
Eventually, they reached their destination. They yanked him off the horse, losing their grip on him. He hit the ground hard, his shoulder absorbing the brunt of the impact. It was still sore three days later. After securing the horses, they took him straight to this cell. As they escorted him here, he used his other senses as best he could. It smelled clean and fresh. A large tract of land. He did not think he was that far from home as the crow flew. The cell was in the basement of a large building. They’d done a decent job of keeping him under lock and key. No sentinel to trick the way their prisoner had tricked their own guard months earlier.
Sloppy. So sloppy.
If they’d only managed to hang on to him, they might not be in this mess.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
The die was cast.
And this world didn’t give you many second chances.
He was loath to admit that the good people of Promise might be in even more trouble than they realized. This was a professional operation; he had no idea who these men or women were, but they had honed their game in these last few years. This place hadn’t been built overnight. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that this new operation had been bolted on top of an already existing criminal enterprise.
He was, hard as it was to admit, an alumnus of such an organization. After leaving the military fueled by boredom and an appetite for danger, he had been drawn to cons and grifting. He suspected Lucy knew, but she was kind enough to keep her thoughts to herself. He hated disappointing her, though. He looked out for his little sister, of course, because he loved her fiercely.
He had started preying on bored, married women in the western suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. Tennis was his entry point. He’d been an excellent high school player, ranked thirtieth in the nation but had given it up when he joined the military. After his discharge, on the skids financially, he began offering tennis lessons for beginning adult players on weekdays, and wouldn’t you know it, married women in their thirties made up most of his clientele.
It was a simple con, as old as the institution of bored housewives. After bedding them, he’d casually drop a hint that he was about to close a big deal with a ridiculous return on his investment. The deal itself came in many forms–cables for faster Internet, solar panels, local vineyards, any of which triggered significant tax rebates from the government. The money would come back to him threefold in a matter of weeks, and oh, would you want to be a part of this?
He didn’t spring the trap unless he was reasonably certain the mark and her usually dopey husband would fall for it, but even still, the success rate was only about ten percent. That said, even one successful score out of ten could net him fifty or sixty grand in cash, money that floated him until the next score. He moved from city to city, changing his name, relying on fake driver’s licenses and passports to keep him ahead of the law.
While living in Washington, D.C., he had nearly netted the beautiful and not very bright wife of a gangster, part of an Irish-American gang, who saw potential in the young grifter. So instead of putting a hole in Jack’s head and dropping him in the Potomac River, he brought him aboard. Jack had been free to continue his scams with some muscle behind him in exchange for a third of his cut. Given the alternative of being left in a ditch somewhere, it was a pretty good deal.
It was a well-run operation and a ruthless one.
They ran drugs and guns and prostitutes, they provided protection to tough, working-class neighborhoods from rival gangs, and they laundered money. Eventually, Jack tired of the life and had to buy his freedom from his debt to his employer. It cost him everything he had, almost two hundred thousand dollars.
But he was free.
And he had gone home to the farm. Eight years in the military, posted to the most dangerous spots in the world, another ten on the wrong side of the law, and in the end, he found himself right back where he’d started. In a way, it had all prepared him for the world in which they now lived. It had prepared him for this mission, this moment.
The corridor fronting his cell lightened a bit, harkening the arrival of visitors. Several sets of footsteps. He was sitting on his bottom against the wall, his hands clasped around his knees. He made no move to get up. Two men appeared in the dim glow of a lantern. He saw Zach and a second man he did not recognize. Zach unlocked the cell and swung the door open.
The new man stepped inside and plopped down comfortably on Jack’s cot. He set the lantern on the floor at his feet. It cast just enough light upwards to illuminate his features. He was a handsome fellow. He wore a clean but rumpled button-down shirt and khaki pants.
“Morning,” he said cheerfully.
Jack nodded but made no move to speak.
“Strong, silent type,” he said. “I like that. I respect men of few words.”
He patted himself on the chest.
“Me, I’m a talker,” he said. “Not sure why. I used to get detention all the time. Maybe I picked it up from my mother. Now she was a talker.”
Jack held a fist to his lips and cleared his throat.
“So what is your name, my friend?”
“Jack,” he said.
“It’s very nice to meet you.”
“And your name?”
“My name isn’t really important,” he said. “I’ve found that anonymity has quite a bit of value in this shitshow we call life.”
Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes. These villains.
“Anyway, I trust you’ve been treated well.”
“Well enough.”
“Great. I understand that you’ve got information you wish to share.”
“I do.”
Jack’s heart was pounding but in a good way. The game was on. Time to apply his tradecraft. They had worked out every last detail of his story, down to the heartbreaking twist at the end.
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“I need some assurances first.”
“Like what?”
“I want my safety guaranteed. My safety and my sister’s. We come live here.”
The man scoffed.
“I could just torture you for the information.”
He said it casually. He would do it, of that Jack had no doubt. And Jack could take it. But there was no need to suffer if it wasn’t necessary. Besides, there was a larger plan at play here. Just a little freedom to figure out where they were and then get the hell out of here.
“Sure, but that’s messy and can take a while,” he said. “You may not have that kind of time. And I’m a big boy. I can take a lot of punishment.”
“Hmmm,” the man said. He scraped the stubble adorning his cheek. “So this information is time sensitive.”
“Indeed.”
“Fine,” he said. “We have room here at the Haven. If we can corroborate your report, you have a deal.”
This was exactly what Jack was hoping for. In fact, it was preferable. It would take time to track down this story, to confirm it, and that would give him the time to do what he needed.
“Okay,” he said. “The other communities, they’re planning an assault.”
The man chuckled dismissively.
“Is that right?”
“One of your boys spilled the beans,” he said. “Told a pretty lady at the Falls where your base is.”
The man clicked his tongue against his teeth. It was a believable story, believable enoug
h that it needed to be taken seriously. And the notion that one of his young henchmen had spilled the Haven’s most critical secret during pillow talk was entirely plausible, albeit wildly disagreeable.
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The mole’s identity is not known.”
“When did this happen?”
“Sometime in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “Maybe a month.”
The man was up and pacing the cell now. Jack had delivered just enough intelligence to rattle him. The Haven was powerful, but a battle against all its enemies at once would be costly.
“When is this assault set to take place?”
“Soon,” he said. “In the next week.”
“What are they coming with?” he said, kneeling down next to Jack. “Slingshots and bad language? We disarmed the communities.”
“Look, I don’t know, man,” he said. “They’ve got a line on weapons. Unknown third party.”
“Why?”
“Winter will be here before you know it,” he said. “Some settlements have done the math. They don’t think they’ll survive.”
“And here you are,” the man said. “You’re pretty high up in Promise. Why should I believe you?”
“Look, my sister comes first,” he said. “Family’s all that matters to me. I don’t want anything bad to happen to the other folks, but she has to come first.”
“So you don’t support this assault?”
“I want to,” Jack replied. “But let’s just say I don’t see a path to victory here.”
The man gently patted Jack on the cheek.
“Smart man,” he said.
“And that’s not all,” he said. “My sister is pregnant. She’s due this winter. I can’t take a chance that we’ve got nothing to eat when the baby comes.”
“And the father?” he said. “Is he one of yours?”
“No,” he replied. “He doesn’t know about the baby. And he’s not gonna know.”
“It’s a tough, old world out there, isn’t it?”
Jack nodded.
“Indeed.”
“And what am I supposed to do with you?”
“I need to get back,” he said. “Otherwise, folks might get suspicious. They’re in the early planning stages. Not many know about the attack. I’m one of them.”
American Midnight | Book 2 | Nightfall Page 17