The Unseen

by Hines

  She looked at him. “Sometimes, basic isn’t so good. No high-tech way of overriding it, or bypassing the code, or anything like that.

  You mess with it too much, you—”

  “Blow off my leg.”

  She stood again. “Yeah.” Pause. “What happened?”

  He stood, retreated to the couch again. “You know that saying, no good deed goes unpunished?”

  She came to the couch to sit by him. “Yeah.”

  He indicated the manacle on his ankle. “There’s your proof. I tried to save a guy from people I thought were planning to kill him. Turns out, I shoulda tried to save them.” He let out a bitter chuckle.“I think the guy’s Russian Mafia, and he didn’t take kindly to my heroics. Coincidentally, he’s also on the Blackboard.”

  She stared at the manacle. “And so this is his way of making sure you do what he wants.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what is it he wants?”

  “Wants me to lead some people to him, like lambs to slaughter. People he’s convinced I’m working with. Only one problem with that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those people don’t exist. Not that I’d lead them to Viktor anyway, but I think he’s convinced I’m with a rival crime gang or something.”

  “There will be override codes,” she said. “To shut it off, or to reset the timer.”

  He stared. Far away, in the kitchen, the refrigerator’s compressor kicked on with a whoosh.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure he won’t be sharing.”

  “Then we have to figure out another way to stop him.”

  “I’ve been working on it, believe me.”

  She flopped back against the couch, stared at the ceiling. “I think I need a drink. How about you?”

  He nodded. “Make it a double.”

  17:33:22 REMAINING

  A few minutes before nine o’clock that evening, Lucas stood across the alley from Saul’s office building, waiting.

  Waiting for what, he wasn’t sure.

  He looked at the building. Lights illuminated the lobby where two men sat at a guard station; outside, security cameras scanned the building’s perimeter.

  As Lucas watched, three quick bursts of light flashed from the hedge by the row houses. A signal. Quickly, Lucas unshouldered his backpack and retrieved his new flashlight, then returned three quick bursts.

  He waited, but no other signal came. After a few minutes, he put his flashlight back and continued to wait.

  Moments later, he felt someone in the dark alley with him, moving lightly in the deepest shadows. He smiled. “Nice to not see you again, Snake.”

  Moments later, Snake spoke from the darkness near him. “You ready to do this?”

  Lucas kept his gaze on the building. “Does it matter?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess I’m ready.”

  Snake held a two-way radio to his face and spoke into it. “Give it to us in thirty seconds,” he said. A squelch of static responded, followed by a woman’s voice simply saying, “Okay.”

  Snake answered Lucas’s question. “Can you wait for thirty seconds?”

  “I suppose I can spare that.”

  They stood quietly, watching the building. The woman’s voice spoke on the two-way radio again. “Ten seconds.”

  Then the block went dark. Everything in the building dropped to complete blackness, the lights extinguishing immediately.

  “Now,” Snake said, springing into action. “Run.”

  Three figures jetted across the street to the building, and Lucas followed. Silently they opened one of the side doors, then moved toward the stairs and sprinted up them to the second floor. There, they all filed into a small utility closet.

  “Generators will kick on any time,” Snake said.

  As if on cue, they heard an odd roar that lasted for just a few seconds, followed by a hum. A weak sliver of light spilled in beneath the crack of the door they hid behind.

  “Generators run the basics,” said Snake. His flashlight came on, illuminating his face in the darkness of the utility closet. “None of the cams, but the alarms are live.” He smiled. “Most of them, anyway.”

  “How’d you get us in the side door?” Lucas asked. “Typically, in a power outage, the whole place goes into lockdown.”

  Another smile from Snake. “Yeah,” he said. “Typically. But then, this isn’t your typical power outage. It’s good to have contacts.” Snake shined his light above them, showing the pipes and electrical conduit intersecting floors above. A makeshift rope ladder hung from above, and Snake grabbed it. “We have about ten minutes before the computers go through their systems checks and reboot completely, and we need to get to Saul’s office on the fourth floor. Elevator’s out with no power, and the stairs are definitely off-limits. So here we go.”

  Snake scrambled up the ladder, Clarice and Kennedy followed, and Lucas brought up the rear.

  A few minutes later, they exited the utility closet on the fourth floor.

  Snake spoke into his two-way radio. “We still clear?”

  The woman answered. “You got about five more minutes.”

  Snake put the radio back in his pocket and led them down the hallway to an office door. At the door, Clarice and Kennedy clicked on lights strapped to their heads, opened the door, and slipped inside. Snake waved Lucas inside next, then followed him into the office and closed the door behind them.

  They set to work, searching files and desk drawers, but finding nothing. Snake suggested they look in the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, but after Kennedy boosted Clarice up for a peek, she shook her head.

  “Two minutes,” said the woman’s voice on the radio.

  Snake held the flashlight on Lucas’s face. “Any ideas, Humpty?” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Lucas followed his flashlight’s beam around the office until it settled on something that made him stop.

  A cuckoo clock, mounted on the wall.

  “The clock,” he said.

  Kennedy scrambled to the clock, pulled it from the wall. Behind it was a small space, just big enough to hold the two or three file folders that were hidden there.

  “Okay,” Snake said. “Grab it and go.”

  Kennedy pulled out the files and stuffed them in his pack, and they sprinted out into the hallway again.

  “One minute,” came the woman’s voice on the two-way.

  They scrambled into the utility closet and back down the ladder, then out onto the first floor. As they dashed into the hall, the main lights flickered.

  “Power’s on again,” Snake yelled. “Let’s go.” He sprinted around the corner, and the others followed.

  A high, ear-piercing alarm began to sound as iron gates quickly dropped into place at each end of the hallway.

  They came to a stop, and Lucas looked at him. “What now?”

  Snake looked around them. “Punt,” he said. He ran into the nearest office, appearing moments later with a large chair. Snake went to the closest window and threw the chair at it. The glass cracked, but refused to break.

  He picked up the chair and threw it again. More cracks.

  Behind them, they heard one of the security guards. “Drop that chair or I’ll shoot!”

  Lucas looked back at the security guards, and just as he’d feared, he saw them standing at the nearest gate; both had their guns drawn and trained on them.

  Lucas heard glass shattering, and he turned to see Clarice scrambling out the window.

  Something whizzed by his ear, and a hole opened in the wall next to him, spraying him with chunks of concrete.

  Kennedy was working his way out the window now, and Snake had drawn a gun. He aimed it at the security guards and pulled the trigger twice; both guards slumped to the ground at the gate.

  Lucas turned to look at Snake again, and the gun had disappeared.

  “Something tells me that’s not the first time you’ve fired a gun,” Lucas said. />
  Snake nodded grimly, then went out the window.

  Lucas followed and dropped to the ground, following the other three to a nearby van. The driver, wearing a black ski mask, listened as Snake whispered something to him, then put the van into gear and wheeled away from the curb.

  Two blocks later, headlights bounced into place behind them. The back window of the van spiderwebbed and shattered as a bullet hit it.

  “Go!” screamed Snake as he moved to the back of the van, his pistol drawn. He sat beneath the shattered back window, his eyes boring into Lucas.

  “What are you waiting for?” screamed Clarice. They raced around a corner, tires screeching as the top-heavy van tipped onto two tires. A few seconds later, the SUV caught up to them and tapped the back bumper.

  “That’s what I’m waiting for,” said Snake. He stood and swiveled, pointing his gun and firing at the driver’s side of the large SUV before it drifted away from their rear bumper again. It plowed into a row of parked cars, coming to a stop with a shuddering screech of steel.

  “I really hope there’s something good in those files, Humpty,” he said as he looked at Lucas again. “I’d hate to go through all this only to find out your friend’s been hiding downloaded photos of swimsuit models.”

  The van’s driver made a couple more turns, throwing them around in the back of the van, and then they were on an interstate, picking up speed.

  The air being sucked out of the broken window sounded like a jet turbine. Snake stood from his crouch a bit and surveyed the area behind them for several minutes before he was satisfied they weren’t being followed.

  They stayed quiet for a few minutes, all of them catching their breath and collecting their thoughts as the wind whistled through the giant hole at the back of the van.

  Twenty minutes later, the van slowed, took an exit, and pulled into a parking lot. Lucas recognized the surroundings as a rest area, even though he couldn’t say where, exactly, this one was.

  The van parked, and Clarice pushed open the back doors.

  Standing at the back of the van, gun drawn, was someone Lucas recognized immediately— even in the hazy orange glow of the rest area’s security lighting.

  Himself.

  Snake started to raise his gun, but then hesitated as his face blanched. “Dad?” he said as he stared at the figure for a moment.

  Snake’s head snapped back as a shot hit him in the forehead, and before Lucas had a chance to move, he saw/felt/heard bullets hitting Clarice and Kennedy.

  Now he stared at his own face behind the sights of the pistol. He felt the van rocking, and heard the driver screaming as he tried to get out the door.

  His Bad Twin moved the barrel of the pistol a few inches and fired at the driver, then swung it back on him. Lucas stared back at the face of the shooter, hearing the struggled gurgling of the driver dying behind him.

  Staring into a mirror reflection of himself, especially one who killed so easily, terrified him in a deep place inside. A deep place usually only occupied by the Dark Vibration.

  “Go ahead,” Lucas said, hearing his voice come out as a strained whisper.

  With his gun, the shooter pointed to the bag that had fallen from Kennedy’s dead grasp. “Don’t forget your papers,” his own voice said to him.

  And then, the shooter replaced the gun in a hidden holster and casually strolled away.

  Lucas stayed frozen for a moment, waiting. Surely something else was going to happen. Surely he would be taken or shot or captured or . . . something.

  But nothing did.

  After a few moments, he slowly crept to the open door at the back of the van and scrambled to the pavement, clumsily falling as he did so. His actions, normally so fluid and natural, felt stiff and awkward. It was the fear, he knew, coursing through his veins.

  Lucas had rarely felt fear, true fear, in his life. And yet, in the last few days, it had been a steady part of his diet. Why did the sight of this pursuer, the one wearing his own face, terrify him so much?

  He ran around the side of the van to the driver’s door and opened it. The driver was breathing wheezily, and he looked at Lucas with panicked eyes. No doubt he’d seen the face of the man who shot him, and thought he’d returned to finish the job.

  Lucas spun around his backpack, looking for his TracFone. Then he thought better of it and looked inside the van; sure enough, a cell phone sat on the console between the seats. He reached across the dying man to grab the phone, flipped it open, and dialed 911. He panicked again when he realized he didn’t know exactly where they were, but the 911 dispatcher said he had pinpointed the location on GPS.

  Good thing he’d decided to use someone else’s cell phone. Did TracFones have the built-in GPS feature? He didn’t think so.

  He closed the driver’s cell phone and put it on the dash, then looked into the man’s face. “Help’s on the way,” he said. “You’re gonna be just fine.”

  A lie, but he felt the situation called for it; no one should die without thinking he had a chance.

  The driver closed his eyes for a few seconds, and Lucas thought he was going to lose him. But suddenly the driver grabbed his arm in a painful vise.

  “The shooter,” he said, his voice sounding like liquid. “Did you see him?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And I’m sorry. It wasn’t me, even though—”

  The man tightened his grip, shook his head. “’Course it wasn’t you.”

  He took a pause for a labored breath. “It was Charles Manson.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  10:41:43 REMAINING

  Later, after Lucas had made his way to the rest stop on the opposite side of the interstate and flagged a ride from a trucker, after he had spent a sleepless early morning wandering the streets, he was, once again, caught in that dead zone between night and day. The Metro wouldn’t start running until five thirty, so he decided to walk.

  He now had about eleven hours to go before his leg was blown off. And that was just the start of his problems.

  As he walked, he glanced down one of the side streets and saw the bright sign of a convenience store still glowing; someone hadn’t shut off the lights even though it was now past daybreak.

  He needed something, anything, to eat. He could just slip into this store, grab something quickly, and be on his way again.

  He approached the store and opened the front door, looking around for the ATM machine he knew had to be there. There was one in the back corner, but not one of ATM2GO’s machines. At least he didn’t think it was; he didn’t see any signage to that effect. Unless ATM2GO had ways of tracking the cameras inside every ATM machine, in which case he was in serious trouble no matter where he went. Not that it mattered now; they didn’t need to find him to kill him. The lovely anklet he wore was proof of that.

  He nodded at the cashier, who sat behind the counter watching a small television. The cashier didn’t even look up as he passed.

  After pouring a cup of coffee and grabbing a sandwich from the cooler, he went to the counter and set down his purchases.

  The cashier, annoyed, finally was able to tear his eyes away from the program. When he saw Lucas, he immediately did a double take. He tried to hide it, but he wasn’t much of a poker player.

  Lucas became dimly aware of the sound from the television, even though he couldn’t see the screen.

  It was one of the news channels. “Once again, we’re following this breaking news story. Officials are searching for a suspect in the shooting deaths of four people found in a van at a rest stop on the Beltway. This image, taken from security cams at an office break-in earlier in the evening and enhanced, shows the suspect.”

  Lucas didn’t need to see the screen to know who they were talking about. He stared at the cashier, who had obviously gone into stall mode, visions of his own television interviews dancing in his eyes. “You gonna ring me up?”

  “Something’s wrong. Register’s locked. If you give me a few minutes, I’ll see if I
can get it working.”

  Obviously, the cashier wasn’t much of a liar either.

  “No worries,” Lucas said, acting as if everything were perfectly fine. “I’ll just use the bathroom.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay.”

  Lucas turned and moved toward the back of the store, sure the cashier had already pressed a silent alarm. He walked beneath the sign marked RESTROOMS, but instead of turning down the small hallway to the bathroom, he kept going straight, through the area marked Employees Only and out the back door.

  Immediately he began to run, moving as fast as he could go and not stopping until he’d run several blocks. In the distance behind him, he heard a siren.

  Sounded like the kid at the convenience store had fixed his cash register.

  This day was getting better all the time. He’d been tied to the disappearances of Anita Abkin and Ted Hagen (who were now dead, he reminded himself), then to a break-in at a secret government agency, and now to the murders of four other people.

  And to top it off, the person who had killed the last four people wore his face. He wasn’t sure what the dying driver was talking about with that Charles Manson comment—perhaps his brain had been flashing random images as he died—but Lucas knew what he had seen: himself. Killing.

  After resting and catching his breath, he began walking again. He turned toward the west, walked two blocks, than went down a back alley until he came to a manhole cover. Once there, he went to the Dumpster nearest the manhole, felt around the back, and retrieved the length of construction rebar he’d hidden there months ago. With that in hand, he went to the cover, pried it out of its seat, and returned the rebar.

  He crawled down the iron rungs, paused to replace the manhole cover, and disappeared into the depths of the DC sewer system.

  Several tunnels and shortcuts later, he was hiding under the catwalk at the nearest Metro station, waiting for the trains to begin running. He had changed into the extra set of clothing he carried in his backpack and put on the Washington Nationals cap backward. That and the sunglasses were the best he could do now. There were cams in the Metro stations, he knew, but very few of them actually on the cars themselves; most of the security cams were at the gates, which he’d bypassed.