A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  Nick did laugh then, a burst of mirth that didn’t dissolve his tears. He wiped his arm across his eyes and shook his head. “You’re terrible,” he said.

  “I’m sexy and adorable,” she said. “The whole package. Now shut up and kiss me.”

  Now, driving down into the dark valley, Nick felt tears at the backs of his eyes but willed them away for now. Ellie was gone. Now he had to get home to Annalise. She was only sixteen, no mother, no father, no siblings. No one except for one set of grandparents three hundred miles away, and him.

  And she was the only family he had left.

  He could not fail her like he had failed Ellie.

  Nick drove faster into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lettie’s pot roast was delicious and filling and the exact kind of comfort food Annalise didn’t realize she needed until she started eating. She scarfed down one plate and most of another before sitting back from the table with a sigh. Across the table, Lettie smiled. “Looks like you needed a good meal,” she said.

  Annalise smiled back. “That was awesome,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lettie said. “It’s all in the meat and how you tenderize it. Hank loved my pot roast.”

  “Hank?”

  “My husband,” Lettie said. “He’s been gone, oh, eleven years now. Stroke. He was a good man. Followed me up here after college in Virginia.” She put her hands on the table and pushed herself to her feet. “I think there’s still enough pot roast left for Nick, if he ever comes back.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Annalise said. “I’m sure he’ll be here any minute. Oh,” she added, standing. “Let me help, please.”

  They rinsed their plates and put them in the dishwasher and covered the remaining pot roast with tinfoil, then adjourned to the living room. Lettie built a fire, and soon the stack of logs was aflame, putting out heat and light and a comforting crackling. Annalise sat on the couch next to Lettie, legs tucked up beneath her as she stared at the fire.

  “So you’ve lived here a long time?” Annalise asked.

  Lettie nodded. “Daddy moved us up here fresh out of the Navy after World War Two. I was born in Asheville while he was fighting in the Pacific. When he came back, I was two years old and didn’t know who he was. Daddy was the picture on Mother’s nightstand, not this man standing in our kitchen. I hid behind my mother’s skirts. But Daddy just smiled and was patient with me. We came up here for a picnic and I let Daddy put a flower in my hair, and he turned to my mother and said, ‘We’re moving here.’ They built a house and sold things out of their living room. Built a second house next door and turned the first one into a full-time shop. First real shop in Cashiers. They ran it for almost fifty years.” Lettie smiled. “Now I run it.”

  “So you’re really from here.”

  Lettie laughed at that. “That’s what your aunt and uncle said when they first met me. I told them that’s a tricky thing to judge. Daddy served on the parish vestry and helped get a volunteer fire department in Cashiers, hired girls from local families to work in the shop. But Daddy was also a Yankee from Pennsylvania, and it took a while for the mountain people to accept him.”

  “How long?”

  “After I got married and moved back here with Hank, my mother broke her foot. Dropped a box of dinner plates on it in the storeroom. She couldn’t stand and work in the shop with her foot in a cast, and getting up from a chair was a struggle. A week after she came home from the hospital, one of the locals knocked on our front door. He’d made a wooden stool for Mother, by hand. Perfect height for her, easy to get on and off. ‘Thought Mrs. Lambert might need it,’ is all he said. Refused any payment. That’s when Daddy said he knew he’d been accepted.”

  Annalise thought about how her family had moved every few years, her father always chasing something new, how she’d had to leave schools and friends behind. She tried to imagine living in the same place for five decades. She’d thought Tampa might be more permanent than the other places she’d lived. Then she closed a door on that thought. She had no desire to start bawling again.

  “What can you tell me about my uncle?” she asked.

  Lettie looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “I just … I don’t really know him.”

  “Well, he was a history professor. And he loves the Middle Ages.” Lettie waved her hand at a stack of books on a side table. “Although I suppose that’s obvious from his reading material.”

  Annalise shrugged. “Yeah, I looked through his books for something to read earlier. He’s pretty into the medieval stuff.” She shifted on the couch. “But he carries himself differently, you know? Not like a professor.”

  Lettie smiled. “Not all professors wear tweed jackets and smoke pipes.”

  “No, I know. But …”

  Lettie glanced at Annalise, one eyebrow raised, but said nothing.

  Annalise thought about how to frame her question. He said he was a spy, she thought. He owns a gun and has a bag full of fake passports. And he killed a rattlesnake with a machete. He didn’t talk to my father for twenty years. What kind of person does that describe? Annalise threw her hands up. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  A log in the fire popped.

  “He was a Marine,” Lettie said. “At least, I think he was.”

  “Really?” Annalise knew this from what her uncle had told her earlier when they drove to Charlotte. But she wanted to hear what Lettie knew.

  Lettie nodded, looking at the fire. “It was a couple of years ago, before Ellie died. We were all at church, and I was sitting in the choir, and our rector had invited one of the locals, Dick Jennings, to give the sermon. Dick told us about serving in Korea, what he learned about sacrifice and duty. To be honest, he rambled a bit, but he’s almost ninety, so I suppose he’s earned the right. Anyway, when he finally finished, he closed by saying, ‘Semper fi,’ the Marine Corps motto. Always faithful. And sitting up there in the choir, I could see everyone in the pews, and when Dick Jennings said, ‘Semper fi,’ I saw your uncle say it too, like a response, only he sort of mouthed the words rather than saying them aloud. The look on Nick’s face when he said it … it was like he felt pride and pain at the same time.” Lettie paused, sifting her memories. “Your uncle is still grieving Ellie,” she said. “I think he probably always will. But he’s not a sad or angry person by nature. He’s a good man. Any pain or darkness that he’s carrying around, it won’t define him.” She smiled. “And he’s very loyal. He might hole up in his house here and act like he wants you to leave him alone and snap at you if you don’t, but if you need him he’ll be there for you, sure as sunrise.”

  They sat quietly then, watching the fire, Annalise turning Lettie’s words over in her mind. So much about her life depended on her uncle now, a man she had known for three days. He’s very loyal, Lettie had said. He’d saved her from the rattlesnake, taken her to Lapidus to learn what they could about her father. And he had bought her gas station candy.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound. She turned her head, listening—yes. There it was. The faint whine of an approaching car. “About time,” she muttered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Cole led his men through the trees, his eyes scanning the darkness, MP5 up and ready. Twice he raised a clenched fist and they all stepped behind tree trunks or crouched behind a screen of rhododendron. The first time it was a screen door slamming from the cottages almost half a klick north. After a minute of silence there was no further noise, and Cole resumed walking. The second time they stopped, Cole felt rather than saw something. Then an owl, its wings wide and breast pale, glided ghostlike through the trees not ten feet over their heads. It swept into the dark without a sound.

  They continued due east. Soon the ground beneath Cole’s feet began to slope downhill and he knew they had crested the ridge between the road and their target. Cole held his arm out behind him, palm facing his men: Stop. There was the faintest glow at the bott
om of the hill, about a hundred meters away. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and the world became a shimmering green, the cabin suddenly leaping to what seemed like an arm’s reach away. The professor’s cabin sat at the end of a dark lake, light shining from windows on the back porch. He couldn’t see through the windows, but he saw smoke rising from the chimney. Someone was home. Cole let the binoculars hang from a lanyard around his neck and waited a few moments for his eyes to readjust to the darkness, then grasped his MP5 and waved his men forward. He began slowly picking his way down the hill toward the cabin, keeping his eyes on the faint glow from the windows.

  He was more than halfway down the hill when he heard the car engine, and he held up a clenched fist and knew without looking that his men had again stopped and taken cover. He crouched behind a fallen tree. It was hard to tell in this narrow little lake valley, but he thought the car was approaching from the far side of the cabin. Just as he grasped the binoculars around his neck, he saw the tiny headlights of a vehicle making its way down the far ridge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The phone almost killed him.

  Nick had turned into Whiteside Cove, barreling over low rises and taking turns as sharply as he dared. His line of sight was reduced to the twin cones of his headlights, dark trees whipping past on either side, the road unfurling before him, twisting and turning through the dark.

  His phone lit up and rang.

  Nick glanced down at the phone lying on the passenger seat: NO CALLER ID. Rita. He grabbed the phone and glanced back up just in time to see, through the windshield, an enormous black shape reared up on two legs. It was in the center of the road not twenty yards away. The phone dropped from Nick’s hand just before he wrenched the wheel to the left. The tires squealed as his Honda fought a skid. Nick passed the behemoth, barely missing it. He shouted, adrenaline slamming through his heart. Then his left front tire went off the road and the front fender clipped a mailbox in a squall of metal and wood. Nick hauled the wheel to the right, the back fender smacking what was left of the mailbox. The SUV began to lift up on its two right wheels. Nick yanked the wheel once again to the left, and the car dropped with a sickening jolt onto all four tires. Nick finally stomped on the brake pedal and the SUV smoked to a lurching stop. His hands gripped the steering wheel as if he were hanging from the edge of a cliff. He gulped air, his eyes wide and startled. He turned to look behind him. The road was empty. The black shape was gone.

  A bear, he thought, his heart thudding against his breastbone. Had to be. He had missed it by a foot.

  A faint glow lit the inside of the SUV at the same time he heard a ring. His phone. He threw the gear selector into park and groped around in the footwell until he found the phone. It was still ringing. He answered and put it on speaker. “Rita?”

  Her voice, as always, was a rasp of barely contained outrage. “Where the fuck are you?”

  Nick looked in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a gigantic grizzly behind his car. The road was still empty.

  “Nick, goddammit,” Rita barked.

  “I’m driving back to my house.”

  “Stay there. There’s a unit from Fort Bragg flying in by helicopter. You—”

  “Who’s after me, Rita?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You’re sending Green Berets from Bragg. You know.”

  Bhandari paused. Nick listened to the sigh of his air conditioner, the engine’s low rumbling. He rolled the dice. “If it’s about Ghawar, it’s either the Saudis or an oil company,” he said. “Who did my brother piss off?”

  When Bhandari spoke, her voice was disturbingly calm. “Somebody gave your brother information that wasn’t theirs to give, along with a large amount of money. We think the money was payment for Jay to take that information and act as a courier. Instead, he tried to sell it. And someone hired a team of mercenaries to retrieve it.”

  Jesus. Fucking Jay. Nick closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he saw something at the edge of the illumination from his headlights, to the left in a field just before the road curved back to the right.

  Rita was saying something, but Nick put the car into drive and rolled his window down and drove slowly forward, looking at the field. The night air flowed over him, cooling his blood. And then out of the dark there emerged a gray SUV. It was parked in the field, about twenty yards away from the road. And next to it Nick saw another vehicle, this one black. He saw no one in either vehicle or in the field.

  “Nick?” Rita said on the phone. “Are you listening to a goddamn thing I’m saying?”

  Nick turned into the field, the Honda jouncing as it struggled over a few ruts. Then the twin beams of his headlights revealed both SUVs—a gray Chevy Tahoe and a black Suburban. The men at the library in Highlands had arrived in a black Suburban. Nick checked the license plate on the Suburban, saw that it was Florida, not Georgia. They could have switched the plates, though.

  Rita’s voice issued angrily from the phone. It reminded Nick of the rattlesnake. “Rita,” he said, cutting across her voice. “They’re already here.”

  “Who?”

  Nick stopped just behind the SUVs. “The men looking for my niece,” he said. He took his phone off speaker and held it up to his ear as he got out of his car. “Just found their vehicles half a mile from my house.” Whiteside Mountain rose straight before him, the cliffs a pale gray.

  “Don’t you go and play fucking Rambo in the woods.”

  “Tell me the boys from Bragg are ten minutes out.” Nick peered in the back of the Suburban. The glass was tinted and too dark to see through.

  “More like sixty,” Rita said.

  The Tahoe’s glass was not tinted, and when he looked through the rear windshield, he saw two large cases lying in the back cargo area. He knew what cases like that held. He turned and looked east, away from the mountain. Toward his cabin.

  “Nick?” Rita was saying.

  He walked to his car. “That flash drive I told you about,” he said. “I left it with the Highlands police chief. If something happens to me, you can get it from him. And look at Halliwell Energy. There’s a PI in Charlotte named Lapidus; he can fill you in.” He opened his passenger door and rummaged in the glove compartment.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He took a Swiss Army knife out of his glove compartment and walked back to the Tahoe. “Tell the team from Bragg to hurry,” he said. “And tell them that there’s a friendly on the ground.”

  “Goddammit, Nick—”

  Nick hung up, then put his phone on silent and wedged it into his back pocket. The SatSleeve made the phone chunky but there was nothing he could do about that. He unclasped the Swiss Army knife, wondering if the two-inch blade would work. It sank into the sidewall of the Tahoe’s tires well enough. He had to apply more pressure to stick the blade into the Suburban’s sidewalls, but soon he had put holes into all eight tires. His phone vibrated two separate times in his pocket. He ignored it.

  He returned to his Honda one more time, opened the back hatch, and grabbed an old black fleece and pulled it on, zipping it up over his green Henley. Then he lifted up the floor of the rear cargo compartment to reveal the spare tire and jack. He took the tire iron out of the jack, dropped the cargo compartment floor back down, and closed the hatch. After a moment’s thought he took his phone out of his back pocket, powered it off, and put it into a pocket in his fleece and zipped it close.

  Across the road from the field, the trees stood dark and silent, watchful sentinels. He knew them like he knew the inside of his cabin. He and Ellie had walked every trail in these woods and made a few of their own. They had moved here because Ellie loved the trees, how the landscape was so different, the green mountains a stark contrast to the hammering heat of the desert sun that shone on the places where they had lived for over a decade, in Beirut and Cairo and Jerusalem and Istanbul, their moves from city to city partially due to his changing teaching positions.

  You were
a good teacher, Ellie said.

  Her comment surprised him, but not as much as his reply. I miss it.

  More than the other thing?

  That left him cold, as if his marrow had turned to ice. He had stepped away from that life, with fewer regrets than he had felt later upon leaving academia to care for Ellie. But there had been moments, when he had been in his office grading papers or sitting in a faculty meeting or even when watching Ellie sleep, that he had found himself bored and restless, longing for something, that old shot of adrenaline that sent the pulse racing, the senses on high alert. The gap of danger—the unknown that lay waiting just beyond your perception. It was absurd to feel that way, even repulsive.

  You were good at that too, Ellie said.

  No.

  Yes, Ellie said.

  I didn’t want to be. I don’t want to be.

  You were pretty good at taking care of the guy in the library with the knife, Ellie said.

  And I let the other one catch me off guard. Nick was surprised at his own bitterness. I’m too old for this. My hip is killing me.

  Well, I’m dead, Ellie said. So you’re better off than I am.

  Nick pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He felt wrung out like an old washcloth. His hip ached. He was frightened for Annalise. And he was not up for an argument with his dead wife, even if she was just an imaginary phantom. He could have avoided this, could simply have walked away from the library once he’d seen those two men step inside. He could have turned Annalise’s phone off and vanished from their radar, taken Annalise and gone somewhere else, maybe to her grandparents, and that would have been an end to that. But even as he thought it, he knew that was wrong. Whoever those men were, they hadn’t been alone. The others were here, advancing on his home right now, and they wouldn’t just go away from wishful thinking. The confrontation with the two in the library had made Nick draw on skills he had learned and honed in his other life. And now he had to draw on them again, and he dreaded the cost.