The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #3 (Scarlet McRae)

by Vanessa Blackstone

  The Nightfall Billionaire

  Serial Installment #3

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Free Bonuses

  Your Opinion

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The NSB jet sped through the atmosphere with little turbulence on this calm morning.

  Rodrigo, sitting pensively in one of the window seats, looked out upon the great tangle of highways, overpasses, and towers of New York City below, thinking about Scarlet and what she had learned—but also about how he might get to speak with her in person without drawing either of them into more trouble than they already were.

  On this cold, cloudless dawn, the urban sprawl below took on the appearance of a dream-within-a-dream: utterly silent, distant, and draped in soft sheets of rose-pink light from the rising sun. The hum of the jet’s engines drowned out much of the sound within the cabin itself, so that one looked out upon a silent world from inside a shell of high-tech, muffled existence.

  Having returned from the jet’s lounge area, Dr. Xiphos Baxter, head of the NSB’s Cybernetics Division, took a seat directly across the aisle from Rodrigo’s. The doctor was a dirty-blonde man with black-rimmed glasses, full facial hair that he kept very neatly trimmed, and a set of unnaturally white teeth. His head was bald over its entire uppermost part, but it was ringed with hair like that of a friar from medieval times.

  The steam from Dr. Baxter’s hot chocolate soy-malt wafted into the cabin air. He blew on its surface, took a sip.

  “Ahhh! Hits the spot.”

  Rodrigo, peering out the window, seemed not to notice the doctor’s remark. The old agent’s brow was furrowed, and he held a hand idly over his mouth and chin.

  Meanwhile, Xiphos played a game on his inner-phone, pressing the index finger of his free hand into the air at various places in front of him as he worked on solving the game’s puzzle.

  Rodrigo afforded him a brief glance across the aisle but said nothing, choosing instead to focus on his own thoughts.

  “So, this case is a real pickle, isn’t it?” Xiphos asked while his index finger continued to poke a variety of places in front of him.

  Rodrigo took his hand from his mouth and looked unhurriedly over at Xiphos, as if waking from a vivid daydream. “You’re asking me?”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah. Don’t you think this case is really something?”

  “Small talk ain’t much my thing, Doctor. Lo siento.”

  But Xiphos, paying more attention to the game than to Rodrigo, continued onward with, “I think it’s really cool, this case. You know, it’s hard… but it’s also cool. Hard but cool. Classic combination. Classsssic combination.”

  “What’s cool about it, ése? It seems to me like—”

  “Hang on. Hang. The fuck. On. Let me just fit this one piece into—,” and a flurry of little stabs from his index finger continued to puncture the air, but faster and more excitedly now. “Ah! Got it! You were saying?”

  Rodrigo shook his head and waved him off. “Nada. Nothing. Never mind. Go back to your game, man.”

  Xiphos took another sip of his hot chocolate, then closed the game and took yet another quick sip. “High score for the day.”

  Rodrigo glared at him, half in disbelief, half in annoyance.

  “So, you know Scarlet McRae, right?” Xiphos asked, looking straight ahead, evidently involved with some other task on his inner-phone, or perhaps simply unwilling to make eye-contact with Rodrigo.

  “It’s been rumored.”

  “Wow! Her? Wow, she’s hot! I saw her at the briefing with the military generals. She’s got a figure that could make an hourglass blush. Ohhh, so tasty! I could just…” He clenched the air with his free fist and took another sip of his drink. “How do you not, you know…?” His body shuddered in a brief, involuntary heart-gasm.

  “How do I not what?”

  “You knoooow…” Xiphos looked sidelong at him and giggled.

  “No. I don’t. What are you talking about?” Rodrigo could scarcely believe he was having this conversation—with anyone, let alone with someone who was supposedly a professional and the head of an entire division within the Bureau. He blinked repeatedly in disbelief.

  Sure, the doctor had probably never done any fieldwork before. He was part of the present investigation at Eastman’s stern insistence, as a kind of substitute for the fourth person on the unit, and as a subject-matter expert on cybernetic technology. But his inexperience was no explanation for his present behavior.

  Xiphos’ gaze returned to the space in front of him with an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Fine. I’ll just have to spell it out for you. A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s for my Spanish-speaking friend. How do you not just…” He looked around and lowered his voice. “How do you not just… take advantage of the opportunities you have? You know. Brush up against her boobs? Touch her smooth, round ass a little? You’re with that smoking-hot woman. Every. Workday. You could make it all look like an accident, get her to think she’s paranoid.” He shrugged, took another sip. “Or maybe you have some dirt on her, and you can blackmail her to get her to do whatever you wanted and force her to stay hush-hush about it. Why not just—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” Rodrigo said, looking him dead in the eye. “Now.”

  “It’s too bad she got dismissed from this investigation,” Xiphos continued heedlessly, forgetting that he was here only because she wasn’t, and speaking in the way that one might when discussing the morning news. “I would have liked to have had some accidents with her, eh?” He winked slyly at Rodrigo as he took another sip of his hot chocolate.

  To Xiphos, this was “man-talk,” and he was one of the men.

  Only this wasn’t really man-talk, and he wasn’t really a man.

  Climbing over the aisle, the old veteran drew close to him so that they were now face-to-face. “You like accidents, huh, amigo?”

  “Oh, I would love one of those with her!” Xiphos’ face lit up in anticipation. “She’s the girl of my dreams. She makes me so… ooooh.” He shuddered again.

  “I might be able to arrange an accident for you, my friend,” said Rodrigo, speaking now in his most congenial tone. “I think you’ll enjoy it. It will be a very good accident. Something you’ll always remember. A special gift.” He lowered his voice. “You know, from me to you.”

  “Promise?”

  Rodrigo nodded with the greatest of Latin American graciousness, placing one hand over his heart as he spoke. “Oh, it’s an excellent accident. Oh, sí. Sí. Muy perfecto. I promise. I give you my personal guarantee, señor.”

  “Great! I can hardly wai—”

  There was a sudden, wet pop as Rodrigo punched
Xiphos dead in the face.

  Blood spilled from Xiphos’ busted lips, and his hot chocolate splattered all over his clothes and the surrounding seats.

  Rodrigo’s voice was stern and severe now. “Don’t you fucking touch her, you sick sack of shit. If you ever get within fifty feet of her, I swear to Holy Mary Mother of God, I’ll kill you myself. I will.”

  Xiphos’ glasses had nearly fallen off his face, and the look of horror and shock he openly displayed could not have been greater.

  With two trembling hands, he placed his glasses properly back on the bridge of his nose, blinking frenetically all the while.

  “W-what was that for? Why did you do that?” He reached down and meekly picked up his empty styrofoam cup. “It’s not like I was going to hurt her. A-all I wanted was a touch. Maybe a squeeze. Even just a pinch.” Xiphos absent-mindedly wiped some blood from his smashed lips with the back of his hand, then made a small pinching gesture in the air with his fingers.

  “You really don’t know?” Rodrigo asked.

  Xiphos shook his head, mouth slightly agape, still bewildered.

  What’s wrong with this guy? Rodrigo wondered. Is he really that much of a sociopath?

  “Can I be honest with you about the reason, Doctor?” Rodrigo asked. “The real reason?”

  “Please,” Xiphos answered amicably, genuinely wanting to know.

  “The reason is called, Stay the hell away from my friend!”

  Xiphos frowned. There was hatred burning in his eyes now. “You’re illogical! And—and violent! You’re like some animal, Agent Perez! I wonder how someone with such a low IQ as yours was ever let into the Bureau. You’re such an awful, shameful disgrace!”

  Wanting to clean himself up, he stormed away toward the back of the plane and fussily shut himself inside the lavatory.

  Pressing his face close to the mirror to examine the damage, Xiphos burned with quiet rage.

  His breathing left a heavy mist upon the mirror-face he tried to see.

  Chapter Two

  Meanwhile, Beth and Rick were sitting together in the lounge of the jet. This space they had to themselves, Xiphos having come in briefly only to get his hot chocolate malt, and then returning to the back of the plane with a smile and a wave.

  To one side of them was a mini-bar with drinks, complete with a shiny auto-serve machine that would chime with every drink dispensed. Rick had his arm over Beth’s shoulder, and she rested her head on his chest.

  She’s an angel, he thought.

  And as delicate as one, too.

  He could smell her silken hair, and its scent intoxicated him to the point of nearly losing himself in day-dreaming reverie.

  I could smell this every day and never get tired of it, but it somehow seems too good to be true.

  He closed his eyes, resting them as he listened to the plane’s unending hum.

  Neither had slept.

  Beth, however, had finally begun to succumb to sleep, but her troubled heart would not allow her a full indulgence in such a luxury. PIR agents, due to the sometimes urgent nature of a case, were sometimes called upon to stay awake for as much as 96 hours straight, but she had never had to be up for longer than 24.

  Until now.

  “Rick,” she asked wearily, “does it ever get easier?”

  “Working in a PIR Unit? In some ways… yes. In other ways… no.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He sighed gently, searching for words that might soothe her without being untruthful or misleading. “Wanting it to be easy—that’s what makes it hard. You’ve got to accept that it’s going to suck sometimes. That’s first.”

  He caressed her hair some more. “When you’re new to the PIR Units, you want the excitement and adventure; you don’t really think about how hard the job will be. You see mostly just the positives, not the negatives. I guess that goes for any job.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “With us, though, there’s a special draw to this line of work. You want to investigate the hidden recesses of reality and see the paranormal, out-in-the-margins things that normal people don’t even know exist. You want to really know what’s going on, not just what consensus-level reality is ready to admit is real. There’s something in you that doesn’t settle for mainstream ideas that teach us that this is a dead, deterministic, material world with no purpose and no magic. The mainstream view—it’s a giant wall of perceptions that continually suggest that none of our fundamental assumptions about reality are wrong. What I’m trying to say is I think we both signed up because of our curiosity.”

  She giggled a little.

  He kissed the top of her head, then continued, “At least, I know I did. I wanted to know the world as it really was, not… not as what the common man thought it was, as though seeking the consensus of the lowest-common denominator was a way to penetrate to the deep, hidden truth of things. The stories of the consensus always seemed… off somehow. Like they were leaving something important out all the time, because they didn’t know it themselves, or maybe they did, but they weren’t saying it.”

  She stirred, nodded, gripped him a little tighter. “Me, too,” she said. “I’ve always been curious, ever since I was a girl. I used to read ghost stories when I was a kid. At my grandma’s apartment. She had her own library of stories, but ghost stories were her favorite. I kept asking her if I could see a real ghost, and she said that someday I might. If I kept looking.” She paused. “I guess those stories affected me more than I realized.”

  He laughed, but not at her, and twirled a lock of her hair with his finger. “For me, it was a crazy uncle. My mom’s brother. He was blind—medically speaking, anyway—but he had these paranormal abilities, and he’d sometimes let family members see them. He kept mostly to himself, though. One summer day, he brought me to a hidden grove of trees. This was back in Japan, deep in the mountains, where he lived. There could be snow at that altitude, even in the summer.”

  “What happened?”

  “He said he had something he wanted to show me. We walked along a winding, twisting path overgrown with tree roots. But somehow, he never tripped, never wandered off the path, and never lost his way. He walked it perfectly, as though he could see every bit of that path. I don’t know how he managed to do that. I could see everything clearly, and I was still stumbling on those damned roots and rocks.”

  Rick shook his head, remembering how tricky and unforgiving those forest-paths had been, and still puzzled at his uncle’s abilities.

  He held Beth a little closer. She seemed to become a little more alert.

  “Maybe he walked those paths so often that he knew them like they were his friends,” Beth offered.

  “Maybe so,” Rick said. “There’s probably something to that. But there’s more. When we finally got to the grove of trees, he told me to sit down and just watch. And that’s exactly what I did. I sat in that shaded grove on top of hard, wet rocks. There were a few patches of snow on the ground—and a giant waterfall only a few yards away. The air felt cold and warm at the same time. It was weird. I listened to the waterfall as my uncle sat in silence. It was nice. Peaceful. I felt like I was home somehow, even though I had never been there. As for my uncle, I guess he was meditating. It was home enough for him.”

  “Then what?”

  “For a long time? Apparently nothing. After about maybe fifteen minutes, I started to get bored, and I wondered why my uncle had brought me all the way out here… But then something beautiful and strange happened.”

  Beth looked up at him, her glassy, tired eyes full of wonder.

  “He held his arms out to his side, like this, see?” Rick held his arms out, miming what his uncle had done, then set them back around her. “He looked relaxed and untroubled. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a flock of pure-white birds appeared. They circled around him a few times, then perched on various parts of his body. His arms, his shoulders, his legs, even one on top of his head. They seemed to glow with their own light, though I could have imagi
ned that part. I don’t know where they came from.”

  “Whoa.”

  Rick cast a look outside the plane to the urban density below.

  “Yeah, I know. He told me that the animals of the forest saw for him. I didn’t even know what that meant. He told me they were his friends and that he loved them, and they loved him back. He said love is the answer to all of life’s questions. He told me to always remember that. He said that if I ever forgot that, I’d lose my way.”

  “That’s wild,” Beth managed to say. “Did it work? I mean… did you ever love and yet still lose your way?”

  Rick paused, thinking. “No. I don’t think I ever did.”

  Beth took a long moment to absorb what he was saying. “Was the reason… was it because you never loved, or because you did love, and love always guided you in a good way?”

  “You ask such difficult questions.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

  “You can tell me. I won’t…”

  He considered her, wondering. “You won’t tell anyone else?”

  She shook her head. “Never. I promise.”

  Rick sighed, then waited a while before speaking.

  “If you promise, then, well… It is not easy for me to talk about it, but… How do I even begin?” He sat in uneasy silence for a few moments, wondering how best to say what he was thinking and feeling. He wondered also how she might react to what he was about to say.

  “Beth,” he confessed, “I haven’t lived a perfect life. Nowhere close to how my uncle lived. I was only eight years old when he told me his secret. In the years afterward, I tried to be good, but sometimes I would forget. Sometimes I’d hurt people or lie to people. Especially those who loved me the most. They only wanted the best for me, and I… I wanted…”