Crash for Me (The Blankenships Book 7) (8 page)

He shrugged. “I’m not sure of anything anymore, baby. Nothing at all. But it fits. It fits who the son of a bitch was, that he would be involved in something this shady and reprehensible. He didn’t make his fortune being a good guy, no matter what he told himself so he could sleep at night. And the thing that kills me—Zoey, we can still make it happen. If we can just get the board on our side, we’ll be able to use my grandfather’s patents to manufacture medicines and supplies that will made a difference in the world. Why wouldn’t he want that to be his legacy? Why would he want to leave the world worse than he found it, on purpose?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She started to say something else, but his phone rang. He jumped at the sound; who in the world would be calling him in the darkest hours of New York City? The cell phone was sitting on his desk, next to Zoey. She picked it up and passed it to him, her brow just as furrowed in confusion as his.

He recognized the number as one of the extensions in the London office of AEGIS, but the caller ID on his phone wasn’t able to give him more information than that. He swiped to accept the call and lifted the phone to his ear. “This is Alex,” he said. A small part of his mind wondered if he’d have to start saying Mr. Blankenship now. He didn’t want to, not even remotely.

He also wanted to shout at whoever was calling him about what time it was, but London was several hours ahead of them. It was early morning there, but not a completely unreasonable time.

It took a long time for the person on the other end to answer, and he wondered for a moment if they might have dialed a wrong number somehow. And then he heard a voice that chilled him.

The voice was slurred, blurry with—fatigue, or booze, or something—and between that, and the accent, it took him a moment to understand what he was hearing. “I’m sorry—you said this is Joseph Crane?”

There was another moment while the man on the other end of the phone seemed to be pulling himself together. Zoey was watching him carefully. He sighed. It would be easier to just let her hear. He put a finger to his lips, and then tapped the speaker phone function. She nodded acknowledgment of his request that she stay quiet, and he held the phone out between the two of them. “Yes,” the man said, after a moment. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Blankenship. I—I owe you an apology.”

Fear snaked through his guts; his dick was quiet and still now, and he wasn’t sure that sex had ever been further from his mind. “You don’t owe me anything, Joseph,” he said, forcing laughter into his voice. “What time is it there?”

“Uh—” There was a longer pause then seemed justified. “I’m not—Mr. Blankenship, that is not why I’m calling you.”

“Tell me how I can help, Joseph. Have you been drinking?”

There was a still longer pause this time, and then he could almost hear the older man shaking his head. “No. That’s not important. That’s not why I’m calling.”

Alex glanced at Zoey. She looked just as confused and worried as he felt. He took a firm hold of the last of his patience—it had been a particularly trying day, after all—and forced himself to stay calm. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Crane, but if you could tell me why you are calling? It is very, very late here—or very, very early—and I was on my way to bed.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

The man on the other end of the phone made a quiet, sad little sound, and then there were words, words in such a torrent that he had to work to understand them. He thought of telling the man to slow down, take a breath, but he’d spoken in a torrent like that, once or twice, and he remembered the feeling. That if you ever bottled the words up, they’d never start flowing again, that you’d surely choke on them. “I’m calling—Mr. Blankenship, I’m calling because I laid down with the devil. That’s the expression you use, isn’t it? In America? I laid down with the devil. I laid down with the dog and I am getting up with fleas. I thought they could keep my people safe, they promised they could, but now I see what’s happened, now I know what they’ve done, and Mr. Blankenship, I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

The words trailed off, and Alex risked a gentle prod. “I don’t understand, Joseph. Tell me what’s happened.”

There was a long, shuddering breath on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know where to begin.”

He had the strangest urge bubble up, to use a twee little voice to tell him to start at the very beginning, that it was a very good place to start. He told himself that he was just tired, and choked it back. “Joseph. Tell me what’s happening. What’s going on?”

“I didn’t trust you, Alex,” he said, and for the first time since Alex had picked up the phone, the man’s voice sounded clear. “You didn’t make me the promise I needed, to protect my men, my factories, my brothers and sisters. So I picked up the phone, and I called the other fellows.”

“Who, Joseph?”

“You know who.”

Cold spread through Alex’s body, prickling the fine hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms. Zoey’s eyes were wide, her pupils narrowed down to pinpoints, and she was staring at the phone as if it contained all the secrets that ever had been. “Maybe I do,” Alex said, as carefully as he could manage, “But maybe I’m not sure, and I need to hear you put it into words. I need to hear their names before I can do something about it.”

“You know,” Joseph repeated, and then there was a sudden burst of sound, fabric on fabric, and through the tumult, Alex could hear the clear shout of “What are you doing here?” He felt his heart begin to race, his palms slickening with sweat, his brain getting snappy and jittery as his body processed the fight or flight adrenaline rush. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t in the room with Joseph, that whatever was happening was an entire ocean away. As far as his body was concerned, it was all happening right in front of him. And he was in danger.

The crack of the handgun was loud, with the distinctive sound of a silencer. It was a movie myth that silencers turned handguns into soft little phut phut sounds as they murdered everyone in the room. The sound was decreased, modified, but it was still a gun, still going on. There was a sharp sound, and then a clatter that he assumed was the phone falling to the floor.

Followed by the sound of something moving over the microphone as someone picked it up.

Zoey sat on the desk, her feet still now, her hand clapped over her mouth and her eyes bright with tears. He could hear the sound of breathing, the soft in and out of someone who was recovering from mild exertion, or excitement. The movie hero urge rose in him again, begging him to tell the person now holding the phone to wait, that Alex would take him down, that this wasn’t going to be the end. That this person couldn’t kill indiscriminately.

But none of that would make a difference.

Alex reached out with one shaking finger and tapped the button to end the call. He dropped the phone twice before he managed to turn it over and pull out the battery. “What are you doing?” Zoey asked, her voice shaking.

“On all the spy shows,” he said, surprised that his own voice sounded steady and calm. “You have to take out the battery, because otherwise they can track you with your phone, even if it’s off.”

“Is that true?”

“I have no idea.”

“Someone just killed that man.” She was shaking, jittering almost, her hands a blur as they pushed her hair back from her face, hugged her elbows, pushed her hair again. He stood, reaching out to her, trying to quiet her body, but she yanked away from him so fast she almost toppled over backwards on the desk. “We have to call the police,” she said, reaching for the phone on his desk.

He hesitated for only a second before he depressed the hook on the office phone. “No.”

“What do you mean, no? Alex—”

He shook his head. “Zoey, listen to me. There’s more going on here than we know. We’ve talked about this. It’s eight in the morning there, and Joseph was calling me from within the AEGIS building. Someone heard what happened. They’ll help him if they can. They’ll catch the guy if they can.”

“And if they can’t?”

He took a deep breath. “Then we have much bigger problems.”

She shook her head, and he wanted to grab her arms, to force her to listen. It wouldn’t do any good, it wouldn’t help, but he didn’t know what else to do. He took a slow, steady breath and tried to let the angry thoughts slip out of his brain. He knew they were born out of fear and worry, and they weren’t anything he wanted to share with her. Not right now. Not ever. “Zoey,” he said, trying to make his voice light and easy, and pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it, but needing to try anyway.

She shook her head, turning her face away from him—which was how she noticed the laptop, still sitting there on the desk, facing them. She pulled away from him with a sudden sense of purpose, tilting back the laptop’s screen so she could get a better view.

“I thought you said this belonged to your father,” she said.

“It did.”

“And this is his email?”

The way she had the laptop turned, he couldn’t see anything clearly on the screen. “What is it, Zoey?”

“Someone just emailed your father.”

He choked on the panic that wanted to tear him into shreds. He took everything he had inside of him and forced himself to swallow, to push the panic down and let it join the ever growing horror gathered in his stomach. He managed not to say any of the idiotic things that leaped into his mind. He didn’t ask “What are you talking about?” or “That’s impossible!” or any of those other cliché movie hero phrases that ruined everything. He made himself wait until the initial wave of fear and terror passed, and then he reached out with a hand that barely shook. “May I take a look?”

She pushed the laptop back to him without complaint. Her eyes were hollowed out, tired, and Alex knew without question that he’d put that look there. He’d done this to her. He pushed that feeling away, too, adding it to the pile of things that he could sort out later, and looked at the email.

It was all painfully clear. The return email address was a name he knew. The subject line was Target. The text of the email was simply neutralized. He clicked into the emails to see all headers. He was no hacker, but he knew enough to see that this email had been sent to him—Philip, rather—as part of a list. It looked like the list was blind; no one would know who else the email was being sent to. There was probably no way to determine who else it had been sent to.

His heart started to slam harder in his chest as it became incredibly clear. This was still going on. Someone out there was still bearing a grudge and narrowing the field according to some sort of plan.

This morning, the press conference, the attempt to turn the conversation towards why he might have killed Claire and his mother. It wasn’t going to stop now. He’d just heard Joseph Crane killed in London, and this was going to be one more thing that would be chained to him. He wanted to say that he had enough money to fight free of any false charge—or half the truthful ones he could imagine—but whoever was on the other end of this, they had power and influence to mirror his, and more importantly, they knew what was already going on. They had the lights on and their hands on the controls. Alex and Zoey were still fumbling around in the dark. They’d managed to figure out the shape of the room, but that was it.

“No,” he said, slapping the laptop shut. After a moment, he yanked the battery on that as well, disconnecting the power cord at the same time. “Go pack a bag. Just a couple changes of clothes, nothing else. Nothing electronic, not your laptop, not your e-reader, nothing.”

She looked at him, and for the first time since he had met Zoey Gardener, the woman looked completely and totally out of her depth. There was a glimmer in her eyes, tears that hadn’t spilled, and her fingers were twisting around each other, over and over. He wanted to reassure her, but it would just be one more lie. “What is going to happen?” She asked. Her voice was so small that it made him ache. It made him afraid for both of them.

“We’re going to get out of here,” he said. “It’s not safe for us to stay and try to fix this here. Leo has a plan. I need you to go get a few things, just a couple changes of clothes for both of us if you don’t mind, and I’m going to wake up Leo.”

“Is this the right thing to do? Doesn’t running make us look guilty?”