by Sam Sisavath
“You have a doctor on call?”
“I wouldn’t say on call, but,” he shrugged, “I guess you could say yeah, I have a doctor on call.”
“And she knows who you are?”
He might have smirked. “My reputation precedes me.”
“I’ve read your file.”
“Is that right? What does it say?”
“That you’re a very bad man.”
“Ladies love the bad boys. Or so I hear.”
“The ladies might, but the U.S. government doesn’t.”
“Can’t win them all.”
His file. What was that Ben had said before Ringo and the other faceless man murdered him?
“Let’s just say there is the official dossier on Porter, and the unofficial one that the public doesn’t get to see. Real eyes-only stuff.”
A day ago she would have scoffed at the notion that the FBI or one of the other agencies would go out of their way to hide the truth about a terrorist like Porter. But that was a day ago, and tonight she knew better. Because Ben was dead for being “nosy.”
“You did good back there, in the alley,” Porter was saying.
Quinn looked down at Xiao. The smell of ointment and medicine was thick in the backseat, but Xiao’s pulse was steady. Weak, but steady. She wondered how much of Xiao’s steadying heartbeat was the result of Porter’s pill and less because of her (lack of) medical ability.
“She did better,” Quinn said. “She took out three of them by herself. I barely survived my one.”
“That’s what she does,” Porter said. “Xiao’s a fighter.”
“What is she, Chinese?”
“Chinese-English.”
“She has an accent, but it’s barely noticeable.”
“It comes with the territory. In her old job, the more generic you can be, the better. It pays not to stick out.”
“But she does.”
Porter chuckled. “Yes, she does. You can only do so much to make yourself unremarkable looking when you’re as blessed genetically as she is.”
Porter wasn’t wrong. Xiao’s face was perfectly proportioned, and Quinn remembered staring into those captivating jade eyes back on the bus.
If I were a man, she thought again.
“She’s the one who’s been keeping track of me,” Quinn said. “Not you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. Or she thought he did anyway, but it was difficult to see his body with the seat in the way. “The three of us have a lot in common. Like me, she’s been where you are now. I guess when it comes right down to it, she felt an obligation to help you out. So she decided to keep tabs on you after Gary Ross’s nightclub. It didn’t help that we had a lot of free time to kill.”
“Free time to kill” until what? Quinn thought, remembering that Xiao had said something similar about being “bored” and that waiting was not one of her strengths.
Why are you still in Houston, Porter? Why aren’t you across the country by now? Or in DC or New York, looking to blow up some high-value target? Why are you still here?
But she didn’t ask those questions, because she knew he wouldn’t answer. She decided it was better to bide her time, gather as much information as she could without playing all her cards.
What cards? When did you have cards to play?
Porter slowed down and turned into another dark alley, and while still moving turned off the lights.
Ten seconds after he shut down the car engine a helicopter swooped by above them, the whup-whup-whup of its rotor blades loud against the sleeping city.
How the hell is he doing this? Quinn thought as she watched the unmarked black chopper glide obliviously past them.
“You warned me,” she said, refocusing on Porter’s silhouetted form in front of her. “At the nightclub. You knew what would happen to me.”
“Knew? No, but it wasn’t hard to predict. That’s what they do.”
“They? Who is they?”
“The ones behind Pete Ringo.”
“You know about him?”
“They tacked his name to your list of victims an hour after you left him at the abandoned building. That’s how Xiao knew where you’d go afterward—on a bus going in circles around the city.”
“How did she know I’d do that?”
“Like I said, we’ve been where you are now. You can profile someone from the comforts of your office as much as you want, but unless you’ve actually walked a mile in their shoes, you don’t really understand their frame of mind. Anyway, it did take her almost the entire day to finally locate you.”
Quinn glanced down at Xiao, looking almost serene in her lap with just a ghost of a smile on her lips, as if she was eavesdropping on their conversation right now.
Porter turned the car engine back on, but instead of returning to the main road, he maneuvered them into a side street.
“Why did you warn me?” Quinn asked.
“It was the civilized thing to do,” Porter said.
She stared at the back of his head, not entirely sure how to take that last sentence. Porter, a wanted terrorist, telling her about being “civilized,” left her questioning her sanity.
“Why are you here, Porter?” she asked. “Why are you still in Houston?”
“I think you know I can’t tell you that.”
“What can you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”
She gritted her teeth and fought back the annoyance. “What about the people behind all this?” she asked instead. “How were they able to pull HPD back at the alley and send their own people to finish us off? What kind of organization has the power to do something like that?”
“Power?” Porter chuckled and glanced up at her in the rearview mirror. “This isn’t power, Quinn. This is a minor inconvenience to them. When they flex their real power, you’ll know.”
She didn’t know how long it took them to finally leave the neighborhood behind (Hours? It had to be hours, but Porter had stopped and hidden and taken so many side and back roads that she had lost track of time), but there was a sense of relief when Porter shifted into fifth gear and found a freeway on-ramp.
Soon they were just one more vehicle heading north on Highway 249, and less than ten minutes later driving past the same Southern Methodist Hospital that she had escaped from not all that long ago.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“To that doctor Xiao needs,” Porter said. “How is she, by the way?”
“Better. It’s that pill you made me give her, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it was your medical expertise.”
“Impossible. I don’t have any medical expertise.”
“Then it could be the pill.”
“What was in it?”
“Something the FDA would never approve. Of course, they’d have to know it existed first before they could say yay or nay.”
“What does that even mean?”
She had a feeling he was smiling amusingly to himself, but of course she couldn’t be sure from the backseat of the Dodge.
When he didn’t answer, she said, “The men back there. In the alley. Were they FBI?”
“Some of them. They pull personnel from various agencies as needed. They have people everywhere. Most of them will never be called upon, but a few, like Ringo—like the ones in that alley—comprise their quick-action teams.”
“You’re not going to come right out and tell me who they are, are you?”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“I’ll let you know when I decide I can trust you.”
“Xiao trusted me enough to help me twice now.”
“Yeah, well, Xiao has been known to make a few bad judgment calls.”
They drove on for another ten minutes in silence, with Porter taking them out of the Houston city limits and toward the smaller adjoining town of Tomball. Large but dark office buildings and strip malls flashed by outside her window, and
the traffic around them thinned out noticeably as midnight came and went.
“How many of you are there?” she asked after a while.
“Do you really expect me to answer that?” Porter said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how many times I have to say it; bringing you in was not my choice. That means I’m not under any obligations to answer your questions. I didn’t know you existed until a week ago.” He paused before glancing up at her in the rearview mirror. “But I’ll admit, my curiosity’s been piqued.”
Gee thanks, asshole, she thought, but said, “Why the change of heart?”
“They sent four people after you and Xiao tonight. They don’t usually do that unless you’re either very dangerous or they want you alive.”
“Maybe they thought Xiao was dangerous enough to send four—three of them went straight for her.”
“She’s dangerous, but she’s not that dangerous. No, they called back the locals and sent four for a reason. You wouldn’t happen to know what that reason was, would you?”
She stared back at him and this time it was her turn not to answer, even as she recalled what the driver had said back in the alley:
“Give it a rest. They want you alive, but it doesn’t have to be in one piece.”
She didn’t repeat what the man had said to Porter. Maybe it was a little childish, but she enjoyed knowing something he didn’t.
“If you won’t tell me why you’re here, or anything about you, then at least tell me who they are,” she said instead. “They killed my friend and they’ve been making my life a living hell these last few days. Isn’t that the civilized thing to do?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Have you not been following the news about my life lately, Porter?”
He might have snorted. “What’s happening to you is nothing compared to what Xiao’s been through. Or comes even close to my life these last five years.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I’m in it now along with the two of you. And I can’t fight back against something I don’t even have a name for. Who are they?”
He didn’t answer.
“Porter,” she said, softening her voice. “Please. They killed Ben. They killed my friend. I’m not going to let these bastards get away with it. But I can’t make them pay if I don’t know who they are.”
He sighed, then: “The truth is they don’t call themselves by any one name. They never did, and they never will. What they do have is a singular purpose, and everything they’ve done up to now has been in service of reaching that goal.”
“Some kind of secret organization?”
“Yes.”
“Like the Illuminati? The Freemasons? Skull and Bones?”
“The fact that you even know those names exist means they’re nothing like them. The only people who know about them are either a part of it, or they’re dead.” He paused, before adding, “Or being hunted down.”
“Like you.”
“Like me,” he nodded.
This time it was her turn to hesitate.
Then, after a few seconds of silence, Quinn said reluctantly, “One of the men in the alley…”
“What about him?” Porter said.
There was something wrong with his face, she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud.
“His face,” Porter said from the front seat. “There was something wrong with his face.”
“Yes…”
“He didn’t have one.”
He’s seen it! she thought, but said, as calmly as she could manage, “Yes…”
“It’s just a parlor trick, created by a device that they carry on them. It has two functions—the sight throws off their victims, pretty much freaks them out, while keeping their identities hidden by producing a low-yield electromagnetic field that scrambles electronic signals so any camera that picks them up just results in static. Then there’s the whole tinfoil hat angle.”
“Tinfoil hat angle?”
“Tell someone what you saw—a man whose face appeared…blurry—and they look at you funny. Nothing shuts people up faster about what they saw than the possibility of being thought of as a nutcase.”
So I’m not going crazy after all. Thank God.
“The man I shot in the alley,” she said. “His face returned to normal after he died.”
“The device only works while he’s alive. It wouldn’t be ideal if his face was still hidden, in case someone stumbled across the body. It’s all about secrecy, about keeping their organization in the shadows. It’s how they’ve operated for decades.”
“They tried to kill me that first night at the hospital, after they drugged me and made me remember what you said and did at Gary Ross’s nightclub.”
He nodded. “Once they got what they needed from you, you became a loose end. And they are very, very good about tying up loose ends. Or at least they used to be. The fact that you’ve managed to survive them for this long is remarkable.” He glanced up at her in the rearview mirror again. “And you have no idea why they sent those four after you and Xiao in the alley?”
“Give it a rest. They want you alive, but it doesn’t have to be in one piece,” the driver had said.
“No,” she lied, and looked down at Xiao’s sleeping form just in case Porter was as good at reading faces as she was.
“I’m sure you would tell me if you did,” Porter said.
“Sure,” she said, “as soon as you tell me why you’re still in Houston when every government agency in the country thinks you’re already halfway across the country by now.”
He might have chortled, but didn’t say anything.
“What do they want?” Quinn asked. “You said they have a singular agenda. What is it?”
“The answer to that one’s going to take longer than a car ride to explain. Besides, I’ve found through trial and error that it’s better if I introduced the pieces to people one at a time.”
“But you are going to tell me, eventually.”
“We’ll see how you handle the smaller answers first.”
“I’m not five years old, Porter. Just fucking tell me.”
“You’re not ready for it. No one’s ever ready for it.”
“What about Xiao?”
“She wasn’t ready for it, either.”
“But she knows now.”
“Yeah, she knows. Why do you think she’s back in the States with me? I’m risking everything just coming back here. I didn’t have to, you know. I didn’t have to do any of the things I’m doing now.”
“So why did you come back?” Quinn wanted to ask him.
And why the hell are you still in Houston, Porter? What’s here that’s so damn important that you refuse to leave, even now with everyone looking for you?
“If Xiao can handle the truth, so can I,” Quinn said.
“She’s been through more than you have. Seen more.” Another long pause. Then: “You’re not ready. No one’s ever ready just to hear it outright. They have to see it for themselves, absorb it one at a time. It’s a process.”
“But you’re going to show me…”
“Like you said, you’re already in it deep. And it’s the civilized thing to do.”
She wanted to argue with him and demand the answers now, but she didn’t because he wasn’t completely wrong. She had seen things—faceless men, Hofheinz, Gary Ross’s fate—that she still didn’t know how to properly put into words, to explain to people without sounding crazy.
But I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.
“The people behind this,” she said, “how did you find out about them in the first place? How did you end up running from them? If this organization has no name and is so secretive that no one even knows they exist, how do you know so much about them?”
Porter didn’t say anything.
“Porter,” Quinn pressed.
“The reason I know about them,” Porter said, “is the same reason they can’t afford to have me running aro
und out here. Because I used to be one of them.”
Chapter 20
“Who is she?”
“A friend.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“It’s the only thing that matters right now,” Porter said. “Especially for Xiao.”
The “friend” in question was a fifty-something woman with gray hair standing next to Xiao checking her vitals while portable versions of hospital equipment beeped nearby. Xiao was unconscious on a double bed and had been since Porter carried her out of his car and into the house.
They were somewhere in a Tomball subdivision on the outskirts of Houston, a place that looked relatively new as they drove through the neighborhood before finally turning into a cul-de-sac. Porter had called ahead, and the garage door was opening as soon as they pulled into the driveway. It was well past midnight, and the neighborhood was asleep around them.
“Does she at least have a name?” Quinn asked.
“Mary,” Porter said.
“See? Was that so hard?”
Porter smirked, but didn’t say anything.
They kept their voices low, even though Quinn was pretty sure Mary could hear them just fine across the guest room. The older woman lived alone as far as Quinn could tell, though there were framed pictures of a handsome older man and a young girl in the living room. A perfectly happy family from the looks of it, but of course the fact that only Mary was there to greet them—and no one else had shown up yet—told a different story.
“You should get cleaned up,” Porter said. “Mary, do you have any spare clothes for her?”
Mary looked up from Xiao. “There should be something that might fit in the room next door. Check some of the moving boxes.”
“Thank you,” Quinn said.
Mary nodded before turning back to Xiao.
“Are you staying?” Quinn asked Porter.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Porter said. He was looking at Xiao’s sleeping form as he said it.
Just friends my ass, Quinn thought before she slipped out into the hallway and followed the lights to the second guest room next door and went inside.
When Mary had said to check some of the boxes, Quinn had expected a couple of them and not the two or three dozen stacked from floor to ceiling against the far wall. The rest of the space was empty and the walls barren, though there were faded reminders here and there that someone once spent a lot of time in the room not all that long ago.