Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  Peter turned back to Al, who’d heard everything. The mechanic walked over with his wallet out, a sheaf of bills in his hand. “This is everything I got on me,” he said, and jammed it into Peter’s hands. It was mostly hundreds and fifties, and at a glance Peter could tell it was almost two thousand bucks.

  “Al.”

  The older man shrugged. The pale sky reflected off his glasses, hiding his eyes. “You really overpaid for that Mustang.”

  12

  SHEPARD

  The phone vibrated in Shepard’s pocket. He’d ignored it twice in the last hour, but this time he carefully peeled off a latex glove and fished the phone from under the white Tyvek suit. The caller ID was blank, but this information was irrelevant. The phone was a throwaway, dedicated to a single client. He had several phones just like it.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” said Shepard. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Buddy, listen, something’s broken loose and it’s serious. I need you and your special skills up here ASAP.”

  Shepard had spent a lot of time in hotels, waiting. First overseas, now here. As always, the caller’s voice reminded him of a television news anchor. Calm and cool on the surface, but unable to entirely conceal his excitement at the prospect of mayhem. And always working hard to sell the audience on his own credibility and authority.

  The caller was a gifted salesman who had convinced many people to believe unlikely things. Shepard had seen it happen many times. Even now, the salesman was attempting to manipulate Shepard, appealing to his friendship and pride. Shepard remained unmoved.

  Intellectually, he could recognize the emotional cues and perceive their intent. But the deep encoded signals were not received by his own inner equipment. He’d known this from a very young age. It had made him a lifelong observer of human nature, attempting to parse the hidden realities of others. He was still formulating his observations, but it was clear that the salesman’s skills were formidable. The man could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

  But not to Shepard.

  “I’m working. I need to finish.” Shepard stood in a four-car garage beside an idling vintage Mercedes. The walls were clean and white. The garage doors were closed.

  “You’re freelancing? I thought we talked about this.”

  “We did. You weren’t willing to make up the income stream.”

  “Well, wrap it up,” said the salesman. “This is important.”

  Shepard looked through the window glass at the man slumped in the driver’s seat. The face was slack, the eyes shut. The chest rose and fell in a shallow, ragged rhythm, but the body was otherwise still.

  “It’s almost done,” said Shepard.

  The Mercedes was a long rectangular sedan, older than Shepard and recently restored to an impractical degree. The hose for a high-end German shop vacuum was secured in the car window by the simple expedient of running the window up far enough to clamp the hose in place, but not so far as to restrict the flow. A garden hose was more traditional for this use, but the vacuum’s hose had a larger diameter and would more effectively transfer the gases. The hose ran along the side of the car to the rear end, then curved several feet into the exhaust pipe for maximum efficiency.

  “How are you doing it?”

  The salesman was often interested in these details, but this was not his area. The salesman took care of clients and employees, the business aspects. Shepard did what he did.

  But not only for the salesman. Shepard had other clients.

  “You don’t need to know,” he said. “Something’s broken loose?”

  He watched the man in the Mercedes as he spoke into the phone. He could see the slight bulge of the man’s eyeballs moving under his closed lids, as if he were having a particularly bad dream.

  The man’s fingerprints were on the smooth flange at one end of the hose, on the utility knife used to cut the hose to length, and on the button that controlled the window. Shepard knew this because he had put the man’s fingerprints there.

  It wasn’t difficult when the man was unconscious. There were several readily available short-term sedatives which, when taken in quantity, would achieve the desired effect without triggering the attention of a pathologist. Autopsies were rare due to their expense, but Shepard was meticulous in both planning and execution.

  “I had Smitty’s team take point on something while you were gone.” The salesman talked quickly, as he almost always did. He appeared to think it conveyed a sense of urgency. “Our client was in a hurry, and it went south. I need you to clean it up.”

  “Details?”

  “Smitty’s out of contact, which has never happened before. Bert’s team is on the way. I want you to work alongside.”

  Shepard did not like working with a team. Or cleaning up mistakes, for that matter.

  “We’ve had this conversation,” he said. “I work alone.”

  “This is different. This could be the big one. Would you please, for once, just do what I tell you?”

  “I’m not your employee,” Shepard pointed out. “I’m your partner.”

  “Technically, you’re a part-time consultant with a profit-sharing agreement. And you can’t see the whole board. Let me do my job. You do yours.”

  In the Mercedes, the man’s head moved slightly to one side. His eyelids fluttered.

  “I need to go,” said Shepard. “I’ll check the drop and call you later.”

  “What time?”

  “Later,” said Shepard. “I’m consulting.” He turned off the phone and tucked it back in his pocket under the Tyvek suit. When the glove was back on his hand, he compressed the hose to free it from the window, then opened the door of the big black sedan. The smell of exhaust was powerful. The man’s eyes were mostly open now and he looked at Shepard stupidly, his lips trying to form words.

  The car interior had been restored quite extravagantly. Polished chrome and creamy leather. It had cost a great deal of money, Shepard was sure, but he didn’t see the point of luxury at such cost. It was an inefficient use of resources, and appeared to be largely an attempt to convince others of one’s worth in the world. If you knew your worth, the expense was unnecessary.

  As a place to die, however, there were worse locations. Shepard had seen many.

  His plan for this particular death had been for the sedative to fade as the carbon monoxide took over. Clearly the man’s metabolism was more active than Shepard had anticipated. He did not like people with vigorous fitness regimes. They complicated his planning. And it never mattered in the end, when it counted.

  He climbed into the spacious front seat and straddled the man’s lap, blocking the arms with his knees. He felt again the electric thrill of being in physical contact with another person. The intimacy of it. It struck him, as it always did, how odd it was for his most intimate relationship to be with the person whose life he was taking.

  But it was an intimate thing, wasn’t it? To end a life?

  The man struggled weakly beneath him. Shepard maneuvered the end of the vacuum hose past the man’s teeth with one gloved hand, and gently clamped off the nostrils with the other. There might be some slight bruising, but it couldn’t be helped.

  The man didn’t fight very hard.

  They rarely did.

  Soon enough he stopped breathing entirely.

  Shepard returned the hose to the window gap, smoothed the wrinkles from the man’s clothes, closed the car door, did a quick check for anything out of place, then let himself out the back.

  The dead man had complex ties to a certain informal organization that took information security quite seriously. Members of this organization were displeased to discover that the man in the Mercedes had been subverting their resources for his own ends, and were understandably anxious to sever the relationship. There would likely be more work to follow, but Shepard had not yet received those instr
uctions.

  He wondered what the man had thought as he sat dying in his unnecessary car. Had the man used diverted funds to restore the Mercedes in which he had died?

  Had he thought it was strange? Or funny? Or sad?

  Shepard would never know.

  On the bluestone patio by the pool, Shepard removed his Tyvek suit, gloves, booties, and surgical cap. He rolled them into a ball and placed them into his tool bag. The back garden was quite lovely, with many flowers in bloom. The smell of plant growth was intoxicating.

  He tilted his face to the sun, savoring the heat on his skin, the fresh air in his lungs, the blood flowing through his veins.

  Completing an assignment, even one this simple, always made him feel acutely alive.

  None of them were difficult, not for Shepard. He liked putting together the puzzle, making events unfold in a certain way. Nor did he mind the actual work, ending the lives of others. Killing people. He was certainly good at it. Years ago, he’d once overheard his instructors saying that Shepard was a natural, the best they’d ever seen. He took pride in this knowledge.

  Still, it was important to keep himself focused and fit and prepared. A simple job could become difficult at any moment. And he was approaching a significant milestone.

  In years past, the anniversary of his birth had always been simply one more day, the same as any other. So it came as a surprise, this idea that turning forty might be important somehow.

  He found himself thinking about this milestone at odd moments, the fact that the years had accumulated to this particular number. It was disturbing, but he also found it encouraging.

  He felt it was another signal of some kind, this time from deep inside his strange and meticulous mind. That the time might be nearing to end this current life and begin a different life.

  Although what that life might be and how he would progress to it, he had no idea.

  He had no intention of dying in federal prison or at the hands of some city cop.

  He did like the idea of gardening. Perhaps growing tomatoes. For reasons unclear to him, he thought he might enjoy that.

  As he walked through the side yard to the circular driveway and the pool maintenance van he’d borrowed for the occasion, he thought about the kinds of tomatoes he might grow. And maybe other edible plants. There was no need to limit himself.

  But first, he would clean up the salesman’s mess.

  He didn’t think that would be much of a challenge.

  13

  PETER

  The first time Peter saw the black Explorer was not long after they left the little town of Bantam, coming up behind them fast on the winding local two-lane.

  “Get down now,” he said. June folded herself into the footwell and pulled her jacket over her head. The driver passed them without looking. He must have been going ninety.

  “Maybe I should get into the back,” June said when the Explorer had disappeared around a corner.

  “Sure,” said Peter. “Get some sleep if you can.”

  She reclined the seats, pulled her sleeping bag over her, and tugged a baseball hat down over her face. Before long he could hear her snoring.

  A half hour later he saw another Explorer, or maybe the same one, coming toward him at a much slower pace. This time Peter could see the driver.

  He was a clean-shaven white guy wearing a blue dress shirt and a black baseball hat, and he looked at Peter as the cars approached each other. It was just for a few seconds, and the man wore sunglasses, but somehow Peter could feel his eyes, evaluating. Peter also thought he might have seen the white spiral wire of a comms earpiece coming up the side of the man’s neck. But it happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure.

  Peter was glad that June was asleep. He didn’t want her to worry.

  He also liked that she wasn’t visible to oncoming traffic. To any casual observers, Peter was just a guy in a minivan, maybe a dad going to pick up his kids.

  Not some kind of maniac who’d killed two men and set their SUV on fire. He wasn’t counting the two who’d died in the accident. That was on them.

  Just a guy, he’d told June. A guy who’d come home from eight years at war. But changed.

  His plan, if he could call it that, was to drive north as far as possible without attracting attention. Every mile and intersection crossed added to the complexity of the search. The mountains limited the number of major roads in that part of California, so putting distance between them and their last known location was the best way to stay missing. The miles rolling away beneath the tires were a kind of comfort. Eventually they’d end up in Seattle, where June had an apartment. She’d told Peter it was a sublet, not in her name, not even the utilities. She thought they’d be safe there.

  Despite the Explorer sightings, the farther Peter drove from the last point of real contact, the less he worried about being hunted. There were too many possible pathways, too many alternate routes for the bad guys to monitor all the possibilities. There were a zillion surveillance cameras out there, but most of them weren’t linked into a single system, and most of them were too low-res for search software. So unless the bad guys had the manpower to track down all those surveillance systems and the trained eyes to manually search all that crappy footage—in other words, unless they really were from the government—they weren’t going to find Peter and June until they did something to attract attention.

  But he didn’t want to take the most direct route, either, so he crossed 101 and stuck to local roads for a while, eventually making his way to Highway 36 winding through Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The clouds were low and thick, and rain fell in gauzy curtains. A river was visible on his left for long stretches, silver and white and fast with runoff from the winter snowpack. Mountain slopes rose on both sides, punctuated by small cascades and rockfalls and the occasional small landholding tucked deep into the woods like a discount hermitage. When he crested the pass, he could see the Pacific Range lying on the land like the body of a sleeping dragon wearing evergreen trees for scales.

  His leg was still sore when he got out of the car to pump gas at Weaverville. The white static didn’t flare in the minivan with its wide windshield and panoramic views, but it rose up hard when he limped into the mini-mart to pay. He didn’t know if it was the fluorescent lights or the plastic windowless interior or maybe just the caustic smell of burnt coffee, but his shoulders clamped up immediately. In the time it took him to grab a few bags of trail mix, a case of bottled water, and a good road atlas, he was sweating hard and beginning to hyperventilate. The wide-eyed attendant stepped back from the counter as if Peter were a meth monkey looking to rob the place.

  Peter held up Al’s money, noting the slight tremor in his hand as he sorted through the bills, then pushed through the door to the open air, where he could begin to catch his breath.

  I’m going to have to figure this out, he thought as he limped back to the minivan.

  The white static. My war souvenir.

  If I’m going to be of any use to her at all, I’m going to have to figure this out.

  14

  North of Ashland it began to get dark. June yawned and stretched, then clambered forward between the seats to sit beside him, combing her hair with her fingers and checking her fat lip in the rearview mirror. When she saw a mile marker, she announced that they would stop for Mexican food in Medford, one of her favorite stops on her regular drives between the Bay Area and Seattle.

  She lobbied hard to eat inside, and Peter gave in. He had to try. But after watching Peter’s face turn pale across the table, she sent him limping back out to the car and told the waiter to make their order to go. They ate at a picnic shelter at Bear Creek Park while the rain streamed down around them.

  “You’ve really got it bad,” she said.

  “I thought it was getting better.” Peter shivered in the cold. He still had only the clothes on hi
s back, and his T-shirt wasn’t quite up to the Oregon weather. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “I noticed your leg is getting worse, too,” she said. “It looks like it’s swelling.”

  “I don’t know about worse,” he said. “But not better, not yet.”

  June looked at him thoughtfully and took another bite of her enormous steak burrito.

  “Tell me about your mom,” he said, changing the subject to something useful. “You said someone broke into her office and took some computers. Do you know what she was working on that someone would want to steal?”

  “Not specifically,” June said through a mouthful of burrito. “She was very secretive. Especially with me, because I’m a journalist. But in general her work had a great deal of potential value. She was on the bleeding edge of research into neural networks, machine learning.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means,” said Peter. “Remember, strong back, weak mind.”

  “I’ll use small words,” she said with a freckled smirk. “Neural networks are large arrays of computer processors, each working on separate facets of a complicated problem. The idea is to simulate the node structure of the human brain. Object recognition, for example, where you might take a real-world photo of an object, then use that photo to identify the object, is immensely complicated. The most successful solutions use neural networks. Speech recognition, too.”

  “So what’s machine learning?”

  “Conventional neural networks need to be taught to do their job. With facial recognition, for example, programmers design the problem-solving pathways. But for really large problems, it’s too big a task for people to program line by line. Machine learning, especially a sub-area called unsupervised learning, looks at ways for software to teach itself how to best solve the problem.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” said Peter. “Isn’t that how we ended up with the Terminator?”