by D. L. Wood
Chloe nodded, pulling off her shoes. “Let’s go.” He removed his Docksides as well, but tied the laces together and hung them on his shoulder. She looked at him quizzically.
“Need free hands. Just in case,” he explained with a grimace, patting one of the guns in his waistband.
“Right,” she mumbled, her stomach starting to churn again.
Though the two resorts were a few football fields apart by road, their respective properties dovetailed towards the ocean, putting their beachfront entrances only half that distance apart. Chloe and Jack moved down the beach as quickly as they could without jogging—not wanting to do anything that might appear odd. They weren’t exactly dressed for running.
Chloe’s bare feet gummed through the grainy shoreline. It was such a contradiction, walking here, down this beautiful expanse, with its salt and pepper sand, emerald waters and open sky, but having intentions like theirs. It only exaggerated the otherworldliness of their situation. This was not the place for such things. Here, with her back to the strong sea wind and gurgling waves breathing their last on the shore—this was the place for that life she longed for. The one she’d perpetually been denied.
She glanced down at their intertwined hands. He had taken hers in his once they had started walking on the beach. She still felt warm from it. She wondered if he’d noticed. At the thought, pinpricks of frustration needled her gut as she tried to reconcile two irreconcilable things—a burning desperation to be anywhere but here, doing what they were about to do, risking what they were about to risk . . . and the maddening truth that some part of her relished being here, with him. With Jack. Whatever the circumstances. It was crazy. She was crazy.
They’d managed about thirty yards when her gaze flitted to his face. Was it the same for him? But his eyes were glued to the horizon, distant and unfixed. He didn’t seem present. That was, Chloe thought, a first for Jack. He was always so in the moment. And it unnerved her.
“Are you . . . okay?” she asked tentatively.
“Mmmm. Fine.”
They kept moving, closing on the LeClaire, now less than eighty yards away. His gaze remained trained on something beyond the hazy line where the water met the sky. “I was just . . . well . . . asking for help.”
It took her a second to understand. “Oh.”
He blinked, his eyes moving to hers, his amusement clear on his face. “You think I’m crazy.”
“No, no . . . I don’t . . .”
Jack’s eyebrows drew into doubtful arches as she stumbled over her words.
Chloe gathered herself and sighed. “No. Of course not. I . . . I think it’s great that you believe in something out there bigger than yourself. We can use all the help we can get.” Fifty-five yards. Fifty-four. A jogger loped by, an iPod clipped to his side. “I really didn’t mean anything by it, Jack. It’s not for me, but if it helps you, I get it,” she offered apologetically. “I think it’s nice. Izzie’s the same way. It works for her, too.”
A couple of sea gulls duked it out over a stray bit of food. Jack ran a hand through his too-blond hair and smiled. “I don’t think of it so much as ‘working for me’ as I do a connection. A relationship,” he said softly, their feet continuing to pound softly into the sand.
Chloe shook her head. “That’s a nice idea. Really. And given what we’re dealing with, and the fact that Sampson could show up any minute, I wish I could believe it. I truly do. But I have prayed, Jack. More than you could know in my lifetime. And nothing good ever came from it. No one ever rescued me.” She abruptly stopped walking and turned towards him. “Except you.”
They stood a few feet apart now, hands still together, their arms stretched across the distance between them due to Chloe’s unannounced stop. Jack studied her for the briefest moment, then sucked in a steadying breath through his nose. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but quickly shut it, apparently changing his mind. Instead, he pulled her back to him and she moved easily. He stared into Chloe’s eyes purposefully, as if trying to decide if something he was looking for was in there. The breeze ruffled her short hair as he sighed and spoke hesitantly.
“Given what we’re up against, what we’re likely to face, now would be a really good time to consider that maybe not everything is as it seems. Maybe there’s a bigger picture. Maybe you’ve been rescued in other ways—”
“Jack, I know you mean well and all, and maybe sometime later we can discuss this. But right now, we need to get inside.”
“It can wait. For this.”
“Jack, seriously—”
“Seriously.”
She inhaled and cleared her throat, buying a few seconds while she decided if he really had finally lost it, getting into this subject at a time like this. But there was a burning in his gaze that told her he knew exactly what he was doing.
“Sometime, ok?” she promised, urgency coating the words. “Sometime later.”
He hesitated, as something like disappointment flashed briefly in his features, then nodded. Squeezing her hand, he inhaled another large gulp of salty air. “Okay,” he conceded. “Okay. You ready, then?”
“Can I say no?”
A tiny smile creased his mouth. “Not really.”
“Then let’s go.”
Together they started again, padding closer to the resort with each step. Thirty yards. Twenty-five. The short, weathered boardwalk stretching into the LeClaire’s grounds was a bustling highway filled with beachgoers. Jack and Chloe remained quiet as they started up its steps, but once they reached the pool area and put their shoes back on, they started up their fake conversation again, just to aid in blending in.
Whites and blues bathed everything. Grass mats covered the floors in front of royal blue sofas that filled the common areas leading into the lobby. They walked past these, into a wall of floral-scented air fresheners creating a barricade around the area near the front desk. Without skipping a beat, Chloe led Jack right past the desk to a long hallway off to the right. The desk clerk, busy checking in a very loud family, didn’t even look up from his paperwork.
They walked down the hallway, past the elevators and lobby bathrooms. The last door on the left just before the hallway took a ninety degree turn to the left, was labeled, “Business Center.” A thrill ran through Chloe as she saw that, as she had thought, no room key was required for entry. Peeking inside, they found the room empty, and Chloe slipped inside.
She turned when she noticed Jack wasn’t following. “Wait here,” Jack said, as he started to pull the door shut.
“Where are you—”
“I’m just checking out the lay of the land. I’ll be right back.” He nodded toward the computer. “You go ahead,” he said, and closed the door.
The space was tiny, really no more than a glorified closet, with one ancient PC and a printer atop a melamine table pushed against the wall. Half a window, overlooking the front parking lot, made up part of the outside wall, suggesting that maybe the room had been an afterthought, carved off of a part of a larger, adjacent room.
“I can’t believe no one was in here,” Chloe muttered, taking the rolling chair in front of the computer and reaching into her bag. Terrified of losing the flash drive, she’d been feeling it inside the bag’s zippered pocket every five minutes or so since they left the car. Now she extracted it and leaned over the machine to locate the USB port. She found it and inserted the drive.
The machine whirred, working slowly to recognize the flash drive. Chloe sighed impatiently and turned to stare at the door. She didn’t like separating.
As if in answer to her thoughts, the door swung open, then closed quickly, as Jack hastened inside then locked it.
“We okay?” Chloe asked.
Jack nodded. “Is it working?” he asked, stepping to the window and drawing the blinds so that he could see out, but making it difficult to see in from the outside.
Chloe shrugged. “It’s slow. It’s still reading it.” She tapped her fingers uselessly on the bottom of the keyboard. “Come on,
come on,” she softly urged the machine. Jack continued peering through the blinds.
“There!” Chloe exclaimed, grasping the mouse and clicking. “It read it.” She paused. “It’s a video file,” she acknowledged weakly.
Jack slid next to her to look over her shoulder. “Will it play?”
Chloe bit her lip. “We’ll see.”
But instead of double clicking the file to start it, Chloe just stared at the screen, unmoving. Jack looked from the screen to her face, which had grown pale.
“You can do this,” Jack encouraged, squeezing her shoulders gently. “You know you can.”
She nodded again and double clicked the file. Another window opened, and the video started to play.
* * * * *
A solitary chair set against a bare, mocha-colored wall flashed onto the screen. The chair was modern, made of black leather stretched over a shiny chrome frame, and Chloe recognized it immediately.
“I think that’s in Tate’s apartment in Miami,” she said hollowly.
The picture jiggled a bit, as if someone was adjusting the camera. Then the frame shifted so that the chair moved to the center of the screen and the jiggling stopped. Shadows fell over the left of the screen. Then suddenly, there was Tate. A long, quiet breath stole slowly from Chloe’s lips, and her frame folded inward ever so slightly.
Tate’s auburn hair was badly in need of a cut and had started to curl at the ends. Thanks to the broiling Miami sun, his fair skin was darker than she’d ever seen it. His gaze seemed to bore straight through her and for a moment she had the eerie feeling he could actually see her sitting there with Jack. Then he smiled, and the familiarity of it took her breath away.
“Chloe,” he said, leaning forward in the chair, propping himself up with his elbows on his knees. How many times had she heard him utter her name in her lifetime? Thousands. Thousands upon thousands. His voice washed over her, taking her instantly through a life’s worth of precious moments and memories, wrenching her heart, tearing at the hole where he used to be.
“Chloe, first you have to know that I did all of this for you. For us. It was my chance and I took it, and, well, I hope you can understand. Even though . . . even though, if you’re watching this it probably means that I’m dead.” He looked down for a moment, summoned his composure, then looked back at the camera. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that, by the way. It’s possible I’m hiding out somewhere, waiting for the right opportunity to hook back up with you—” A brief, ridiculous hope expanded in Chloe like a bubble, then popped instantaneously. She had identified her brother’s remains. He was wrong. It wasn’t possible.
“But, if I am, it brings me to the second thing. Which is . . . I’m sorry. I never intended for this to happen. It seemed like the perfect plan, you know, and then, well, things just sort of spiraled out of control. But,” he quickly pointed out, “I’ve still got contingency plans in place and it’s looking good, so as I sit here, of course I’m hoping you’ll never see this. I’m hoping that everything will work out exactly as I’ve planned, and pretty soon you and I will have everything we always deserved but never had the luck to get. There’s just so much I’ve—we’ve—been cheated out of. So,” he said decidedly, a guilty twitch in his expression suggesting that he was already certain she would disapprove, “I finally came to the conclusion that if cheating is the only way to get anything in life, then so be it.”
“Oh, Tate,” she moaned ruefully. “What did you do?”
“I’m going to tell Rohrstadt to send this to you as soon as he gets word I’ve disappeared, or . . . been killed. Or whatever. No matter what anyone has told you about how I died, whether it was a drowning, car accident, heart attack, whatever, you need to be very careful. I promise it was no accident. I was murdered. And, well, there’s a slight chance . . . although I think I covered my tracks pretty well, and they shouldn’t suspect you in the least . . . that the people that killed me are going to be coming after you.”
“Idiot,” Jack growled, and the tone was so foreign on him that Chloe looked up just to make sure he’d actually said it. “Sorry,” he said, but his eyes still flashed.
Tate continued, and she turned her gaze back to the screen.
“So, this is all on you now. And the reward is all yours, too. You’ll just need to hold on for a few weeks—and then you’re home free. After that, go someplace safe, someplace secret. Somewhere not even I would guess. Buy a house, buy a villa, hey, buy a yacht. You’ll be able to afford it. But before then, you’re going to have to come to Miami . . . but I’ll get to that.
“For now, start using just cash. No credit cards. These people are very powerful. They have fingers everywhere. And don’t trust anyone.”
Anyone. The word echoed in Chloe’s mind as she became acutely aware of Jack’s presence behind her. But Jack wasn’t just anyone. He was Jack. And she needed him. At least for now.
“I’ve thought this through a thousand times. I know I’ve covered all my bases. I don’t think I’m going to need this video, but it’s kind of like life insurance, you know? Just in case. With this much money at stake, I’d be stupid not to take this precaution.”
“Money,” Chloe mumbled in a distant, knowing sort of way.
“I guess I should start at the beginning. I’d been in Miami about six weeks when I met this guy in a bar in Bayside. I never caught his name, but he worked for WorldCore Bank’s Miami office in some kind of management position. Anyway, he tosses back one too many and gets loose-lipped. We get to talking about our jobs, and when he finds out I’m in tech security, he launches into this story about how he’s in for a conference on system security, and isn’t that a coincidence. Tells me how they could really use a guy like me because so far they haven’t been able to come up with a reliable gatekeeping system. How they’re constantly crashing, getting invaded, hackers playing havoc with accounts. And apparently WorldCore’s not the only one with the problem. He even names names for me. He’s practically on the verge of tears because he had something to do with buying their current firewall program and his job’s on the line. Well, eventually, he wanders off, and starts blubbering to somebody else. But I can’t stop thinking about it, and suddenly, I realize that the universe has dropped the perfect opportunity into my lap.”
Chloe shook her head side to side, as if trying to convince Tate not to say what she felt sure was coming next.
“Please tell me he didn’t,” Jack whispered.
“So, I started checking out some of the banks he’d talked about. It’s me, so, you know, it wasn’t even really that hard to hack in and cover my tracks. But it didn’t take long to figure out that I would need someone else, someone on the inside—”
A light flashed from the window, and Jack’s head whipped towards the blinds. He squinted through them, and watched as a brown sedan jerked to a stop at the bellhop stand by the lobby. “Stop it!” he barked at Chloe, over Tate’s continuing monologue.
“What?” Chloe said, spinning towards him and following his gaze to the window.
“The video, stop it now,” he repeated, and moved to stand against the wall to hide his body from view. As two men leapt from the sedan, two patrol cars pulled up right behind it.
“What? What’s happening?” Chloe asked, pausing the video.
“Sampson,” Jack said turning toward her. “We’ve got to move. Now.”
The color drained from her face as she continued to sit, unmoving.
“Chloe, now!”
The sharpness of his voice jolted her into action. She clicked out of the video window and ripped the flash drive from the back of the PC. Her heart pounded as Jack grabbed her hand and pulled her to the door. He peeked out for a moment and closed the door again.
“They’re at the front desk,” he said. Chloe felt unsteady on her feet and Jack’s voice was starting to sound distant and fuzzy around the edges. She was having trouble focusing.
“Hey,” he said, grabbing her face with his hands. “Chloe, y
ou hear me? Chloe. Look at me.”
“We’re dead, Jack.”
“Hey, listen to me. We’re not dead. I don’t want to hear that again, got it? I don’t think they know we’re back here or they’d already be here, okay? We need to go out this way,” he said, tilting his head in the direction that the hallway continued down. “You ready?”
She nodded.
“Come on, then,” he urged, pulling her hand to him as he opened the door just enough to slide out. An advantageously placed potted palm blocked them partially from view as they sprinted the short few feet to the end of the hall, where it turned left ninety degrees and out of sight of the front desk.
A resounding crash rang out followed by a chorus of sharp cries, as Jack and Chloe cleared the corner and immediately ran full force into a hotel employee carrying a tray of covered dishes above his shoulder. All three flew backwards from the impact as silver lids and china plates smashed on the blue and white tiles, clattering incessantly as they circled one another amongst splattered food and scattered utensils. Chloe slammed hard against the wall, then ricocheted back, losing her footing in the spilled food and landing spread-eagled on the floor. Jack and the waiter landed on either side of her, their clothes smeared with food.
The waiter, fumbling in the sloppy mess, cursed loudly. Jack, apparently dazed, shook his head as he stood. “Get up, Chloe,” he urged, reaching toward her and pulling her to her feet. “We’ve got to go. Fast. They’ll have heard.”
As she straightened up, Chloe shook her hand violently to sling off some scrambled eggs, leaving a gushy splatter on the opposite wall. New panic seized her as she stared at her empty hand. The hand that had been squeezing tightly around the flash drive before the crash.
To the bewilderment of both Jack and the waiter, Chloe dropped back to her knees and began frantically groping through the soggy mess of china and glass shards, eggs, juice, and potato hash.
“Hey lady, wait—” started the waiter.
“Chloe, now!” Jack barked, tugging on her arm. “What are you doing?”