The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #2 (Scarlet McRae)

by Vanessa Blackstone

  The Nightfall Billionaire

  Serial Installment #2

  Vanessa Blackstone

  Copyright © 2019 by Vanessa Blackstone

  All rights reserved.

  This publication is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents (other than those in the public domain) are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  This publication has not been approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Bureau.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Free Bonuses

  Your Opinion

  A Sneak Peak at the Next Installment…

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The NSB jet, its engines rumbling in the dusk, began its decent to the Bureau’s runway.

  Some of the clouds had broken, and a reddish sunlight, the color of fiery gold, was shining into the cabin through the jet’s many windows. The light slipped languidly across the interior of the cabin as the jet turned, shuddered, and descended.

  More shaking from the plane. The change in air pressure stopped up Scarlet’s ears. She yawned to relieve the pressure. Her ears popped and squeaked, then the sounds inside the cabin seemed suddenly louder and clearer.

  She looked out her window at the enormous pillars of concrete, wires, and steel below. They were now being lost in the shadows, their many colorful lights blinking chaotically in the gloom of the dying day.

  Soon we will know.

  Westmore was performing the autopsies this very evening, she had the two security cameras of interest, and the hair was theirs to analyze without restriction. It had been a long day of collecting the evidence, cataloging it, and filling out the necessary paperwork to remove it all from the base, but she sensed that the payoff was going to be well worth all the effort.

  She’d have a report on “Red Bird” waiting for her back at HQ. The Air Force was, presumably, tracking down their stolen technology. And Kat Yang, Scarlet’s best friend, had picked up Jamison from school and was babysitting him even now. It was not uncommon for Kat to have to take care of Jamison for a few days; Scarlet was sometimes away on assignment or otherwise tied up with urgent work away from home.

  And the sooner we know what’s going on, the better. We need to get to the bottom of this.

  For all of us.

  She thought of Jamison, and her fingers tightened around her armrest.

  She successfully held the tears a bay.

  Not while I have work to do. Not now.

  Outside, the sun, sinking below the horizon, spread its rose-golden fingers out in another abandoning of what it once, long ago, had held and cherished.

  Rick was seated next to Beth on the jet. The look of nervousness on her face was unmistakable.

  It must have been tough for a rookie to share in the responsibility of a case of this magnitude. Hell of a way to get your toes wet. It’s a full-on dive, head-first, into the deepest shit in the ocean, with no scuba gear.

  “Hey, you all right?” he asked her.

  She was biting her lower lip. She nodded stiffly. “Yeah, I’m okay.” Her voice was jittery and faint; he could barely hear it.

  He smiled gently, though. “Man, I remember my first mission. I was fresh out of training, itching to get my hands in the dirt. Itching to get out into the real world, you know? The parts of it that nobody sees or deals with, and see it for myself.”

  “Yeah, it was wild,” Beth agreed, “the feeling I had at graduation from Basic. It was just a few short months ago, but it seems like… I don’t know. Half a lifetime away. I feel like a different person now.” She paused and appeared to be thinking. “I’m not the same as I was. My perspective… it’s already so different. I guess nothing really prepares you for what you encounter out in the field.”

  “Nothing can,” he chuckled. He leaned a little closer to her, as if sharing a secret, and his voice got lower. “Hey. My first mission? We were out in Colorado, investigating these mysterious, horn-like sounds that seemed like they were coming out of the sky.”

  “Wild. What happened?”

  “No one knew where they were coming from. They seemed like they were coming from everywhere in the sky, not from one specific place. I was supposed to have some theory or idea about where these noises were coming from, right? It was kind of my job. Well, I was clueless as shit. I had all these fancy electronic instruments, see, but I barely knew how to use them. I was brand new to the PIR Units. I was lucky just to know how to get my instruments out of the bag and remember how to turn them on and off.”

  Beth giggled.

  Rick continued, “No, no, it’s true!”

  “It is not!” She was smiling.

  “I was shivering my ass off in the cold. It got so fucking cold up there. Snow, wind, and ice everywhere at that altitude, up in the mountains. Anyway, I was so worried that I was going to screw something up. Then, out of the blue, there was this one reading on my instrument, see? It was flashing on the display and telling me how far away it thought the sound was coming from. Echo-location or some shit.”

  “How far away was it?” Her blue eyes, for a moment, regained some of the sparkle they once had.

  “4,032. I still remember the number. I ran up to McRae, excited that I’d finally found something for her.”

  “4,032 what? Feet? Meters?”

  “4032—an error code for the device I was using.”

  Beth laughed and pushed him on the shoulder. “You did not get that. There’s no way that happened!”

  “Cross my heart. Cross my heart!”

  “You’re so full of it. I can’t believe you!” She pushed him again, but she was giggling the whole time.

  They laughed some more, and then another silence ensued. It was gently broken by a quiet question from Beth, who again looked worried.

  “Hey, Rick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we going to make it out of this one?”

  He didn’t immediately answer, so she quickly continued, “Just tell me the truth. You don’t have to lie. I just… I just want to know.” She shrugged weakly.

  The plane shuddered. It was descending rapidly toward the NSB’s airstrip, which was set so tightly inside the city that it was never easy to touch down upon or depart from. It was only through the aircrafts’ AI auto-pilots that take-offs and landings at the airstrip were possible; no human could have managed to execute them with sufficient precision to keep the jet from crashing.

  Rick looked over at her. “Yeah. We’re going to make it.”

  Noticing that Beth still looked worried, though, he placed his hand over hers.

  Rick was not a praying man, but he could not help but think that to place his hand over this beautiful woman’s, and to offer her comfort, even if only by his presence, was a kind of silent prayer, a shared moment of something holy.

  “Hey, I’m going to watch out for you,” he told her in a hushed voice, looking affectionately into her eyes. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. We’ve got this.”

  The cabin shook, and the lights inside it flickered and went out. The metallic, burnt odor of compressed air blew insistently in from the plastic
, grey nozzles above their heads. The jet’s landing gear deployed, its wheels slammed into the tarmac, and its engines, thrown suddenly into full-reverse, roared with agonized rage.

  Beth’s hand, meanwhile, cold and clammy, held onto his tighter.

  Rick… Thank you… I will try to be brave.

  On the tarmac, Smerch stood stock-still, his coat and tie blowing in a frigid wind that had now become a gale. Behind him were a pair of the Bureau’s squad cars, silently blasting a confusion of red-and-blue lights into the endless night.

  Scarlet could see him from one of the jet’s windows, but he also appeared on her inner-phone.

  “I’ve got something for you, McRae.”

  Chapter Two

  The sirens continued their silent flashing into the night as the squad cars raced from the tarmac to the NSB’s main building, roughly a mile away. Inside one of the cars, Scarlet concisely brought Smerch up to speed on what they had discovered. He listened intently, as if paying attention for a specific piece of information, and nodded from time to time, but he said little.

  Once inside the NSB’s main building, he swiftly ushered the agents into a large, dark room filled with computers and monitors. At the front of the room was one, lone, large view-screen upon which the display of any computer in the room could be cast.

  “This is our command center for this operation,” he told them. He gestured to it with one hand, while the other was in his coat pocket, fiddling with something. “I’ve got all our PIR Units working on this one. Eastman’s unit is being recalled from their current assignment in Australia to assist. They’ll be here by morning.”

  Scarlet looked around the room. Indeed, all the Bureau’s PIR Units, save for Eastman’s, were present. Stockton’s team, Wilcox’s, Gambetti’s, Fowler’s, and of course her own. Enough PIR agents to sniff out the origins, connections, and implications of any clue whatsoever, and each member with the determination of a bloodhound.

  That’s what I’m talking about, she thought to herself, seeing all her PIR colleagues in one place and surveying their faces. Their eyes were like those of starved wolves in the night.

  And Eastman’s team on the way.

  Amen to that.

  Beth, never having met Eastman or his team, tugged on Scarlet’s sleeve and whispered, “Who’s Eastman?”

  “Hal Eastman. Our best. A legend among us. Had he been here, he would likely have been sent out to the Air Force base, not us. He’s… a specialist, you could say.”

  “A specialist? In what?”

  “In doing the impossible, Summers.”

  Beth looked with surprise at Scarlet, who was grinning ever so slightly.

  “He started off in one of the Bureau’s assassination squads,” Scarlet explained, “but he moved into a PIR Unit several years ago. Said he wanted more of a challenge, something scarier, more exciting. He’s been rising through the ranks pretty steadily ever since he got a PIR badge. Pulled off some of the greatest and most dangerous investigations our division has ever seen: stuff of nightmares wrapped inside of nightmares. The things of a madman’s foulest hallucinations. That’s what Eastman’s team takes on. Unofficially, they’re our vanguard. The best of us, Summers.”

  Beth’s eyes went wide.

  Smerch suddenly yelled out from the front of the room, “McRae, you’re primary for all teams. Your team was on the ground; you four know more about what’s going on than any of us.” He drew a stubborn line through the air with his index finger as he spoke. Sweat had formed on his brow.

  Scarlet sent a quick message to Kat via inner-phone. It’s going to be a long night. Stay with Jamison. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Will try to be back in the morning.

  “Yes, sir.” She pulled out the evidence bag which contained the hair Beth had found and held it up in the air. “Hair,” she called out.

  Without her having to say another word, another agent rushed up to her, snatched the bag, and disappeared down the hall, toward the Bureau’s forensic labs.

  “Cameras,” she then called out, handing off of a small crate of the base’s burnt security cameras to another agent who began likewise running them to a lab.

  So far, so good.

  Scarlet’s team briefed the rest of the PIR agents on what was known about the case: the contents of the security camera footage, the dead bodies, the holes in the fence, the apparent absence of DNA, the more-or-less uncooperative stance of the Air Force in the investigation, and the mentioning of the secretive Red Bird project.

  She thought about mentioning Mac Stone—but desisted.

  No, I’m playing that one close to the chest. Billionaires like him can buy people like us by the barrel. For all we know, he already has someone here, in this very room, on his payroll.

  That was a problem—one of many problems—with society, Scarlet mused. When everyone was out for only themselves, trust broke down. Society became atomized, down to the lonely individual. In effect, there were no more close communities, only, at best, transient networks of similarly-interested individuals. In a world of “every man for himself,” it’s never really clear who’s telling the truth and who isn’t, who might stab you in the back and who won’t. Even the people you trust the most might have some incentive to cross you if they perceive it to be in their best interests to do so. Maybe not to hurt you out of spite, no, but to protect themselves or to climb one more rung on a ladder somewhere.

  Such a gospel had many adherents within the AFE and beyond. In her private lexicon, Scarlet referred to it as “The Exacting Faith” for the terrible price it inevitably exacted from all who took up its cross and followed it to its hilltop of abundance, happiness, and salvation.

  And it was this faith that was, disappointingly, held by many people within her own agency.

  As for people outside the agency, those in gutters, or in the warrens, or in their own, well-protected mansions…

  When she thought about the dysfunction of her own society, it irked her. Sickened her. She tried to push away the disappointing thoughts.

  Not now.

  With some effort, her mind quieted, and she began to wish for something better, something more, yet she could not pinpoint exactly what. It was a deep and wordless yearning. It seemed—

  “About Red Bird,” said Steph Ackerman, one of Wilcox’s agents, loudly enough for the room to hear her, yet not so loud as to be obnoxious. She was far too socially savvy to do such, even in an emergency like this. Her long, silky hair was tied behind her in a neat ponytail, and she had an oval, youthful face with a wide mouth and a small pair of glasses. “What we know about project Red Bird, plus a dollar fifty, gets you a hot chocolate with a pretty candy cane to put in it.”

  Seated at one of the computers with her shoulders hunched tightly upward and her arms crossed, she did not appear amused at her own statement, however. Her glasses cooly reflected the light from her monitor.

  Wilcox’s team, to which Steph belonged, had been Scarlet’s sister unit on the case while the latter were at Quincy AFB. Steph had personally worked on digging up information on Lt. Col. Pedone and Red Bird. In fact, to sniff out hard-to-find information was her specialty, something she greatly prided herself on.

  “I need you to tell us what you know about that project,” Scarlet told Steph, “even if that’s next to nothing. Share what you have.”

  “Well,” Steph began, apparently searching carefully for the right words to use in this delicate situation, “the information I was able to find is… unconfirmed. And there wasn’t much of it to begin with. There was some encrypted chatter on the Dark Web by what appeared to be some underground scientists working on a highly technical black-ops project. There’s some indication that the project involved Quincy AFB, but the data is pretty sketchy and cryptic. I wouldn’t put my total trust in it.”

  Smerch interjected as cooly as he could. “We don’t need to be following Red Bird. That’s the Air Force’s problem, goddamnit. We need to find that girl. That’s our mission
. That’s what everyone here should be focused on.”

  Rodrigo was standing in a corner of the room with his arms crossed. “But what if Red Bird leads us to her? What if we need a solve on Red Bird before we can get a solve on her, ése?”

  Smerch, the bags under his eyes appearing as dark as a cadaver’s under the fluorescent lighting, glowered at Rodrigo for a few seconds, then he waved him off in disgust.

  “Sir, with all due respect,” Scarlet reminded him as tactfully as possible, “you appointed me primary on this case. I’ll lead the investigation.”

  “Or not,” Smerch remarked, his head tilted slightly to the side, as if considering his options. “I can take you off it anytime, at my discretion… scout.” There was a brittle edge to his voice.

  “At least until Eastman arrives, that won’t happen,” Scarlet reasoned. “No one else can lead this team right now. Not if we want to find this girl.”

  Checkmate, boss.

  Smerch fitfully loosened his necktie. He then covered his eyes with the back of his hand, appearing to be thinking.

  After a brief moment, he answered as calmly as he could, “McRae, we go for the girl, not Red Bird. This is important. I’m the boss, and it’s my call. You don’t get a say in this.”

  “But, sir—” she began.

  “But nothing, McRae!”

  The roomful of agents stopped what they were doing and looked at what was happening. They dared not speak or move.

  Scarlet waited a beat before answering. It was not quite right to escalate this confrontation, but to dismiss Red Bird out of hand was, she believed, a serious mistake.

  She consciously kept her voice calm. “Sir, Red Bird surely contains the key to this girl: what she wants, who she is, whom she might be working for. I don’t mean to be obstinate, sir, but Red Bird is our best bet for putting this case to rest. We unlock Red Bird—we find this girl. And everyone gets to go home.”