Nightstalkers (23 page)

“Yeah,” Scout said, “that’s been the real problem until you people arrived. Bluebeard’s house.”

They reached the porch.

“Wait there,” she said, pointing at a swing. Before Nada could say anything, she disappeared inside the house, returning a few seconds later with a garage door opener. She sat down next to Nada.

“I watched them build that thing.” She pointed at the mansion, more a fortress. “I could sit in my room in the day and on the roof at night and watch. And a lot of stuff was done on it at night. Stuff Bluebeard didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“Who is Bluebeard?”

“The cray-cray who built it and lives in it. But he’s gone a lot. He’s gone now. He took off with his friends in two SUVs just after you guys arrived, so that was also weird.”

The garage door opened across the street. As the black SUVs rolled down the driveway, Scout opened her own garage doors. In ten seconds the team was across the street and in the safety of another garage. Scout hit the remote and the doors rolled down.

Nada stood.

“Where are you going?” Scout asked.

“To join my team,” Nada said.

“They can’t handle a curling iron?”

Nada considered that. Sometimes the Fireflies went into the deadliest creatures or things and sometimes it was like they’d simply bounced into something and gotten stuck. A curling iron didn’t strike him as a particularly deadly event, although the burn on Scout’s head was not to be discounted. She was lucky the Firefly hadn’t shot enough juice through her to kill her.

The earpiece crackled on the team net.

“Nada?” Moms asked.

“I’m keeping front security,” Nada said. “We’ve got four more Fireflies free, don’t forget.”

“I don’t forget.” Moms’s voice was a bit harsher than normal.

“Tell me about Bluebeard and the house,” Nada asked Scout.

“I’ve rarely seen him,” Scout said. “Just his SUVs, with tinted windows, right into the garage and out. Like you guys. He doesn’t
have a mailbox, which is kind of weird, too. I told my parents and they told me to mind my own biz. I even told the dummy who runs the security thing and he told me Bluebeard paid his fees just like everyone else, more in fact, so pretty much the same. When they were building it, I saw them put in, at night, a safe room deep in the basement, except I don’t think it’s a safe room. And I also saw them unload a couple of really big safes, which is just plain weird.”

“Safes?” Nada stared at the dormer windows along the second floor and could swear he saw the silhouettes of gun mounts inside. He scanned the yard and noted small mounds around several struggling trees that didn’t seem to be getting much attention. The landscaping was very different from all the other houses on the street. Switching from considering a house in a gated community to a firebase inside a larger defensive complex, Nada could swear those mounds were laid out with a perfect firing pattern for a series of Claymore mines. If they went off, anything on that lawn would be sprayed with hundreds of small steel ball bearings. A perfect kill zone.

“Did you see who put in the bushes?” Nada asked.

“The shrubbery?” Scout said. “Nope. People here make some weird demands, but who plants shrubbery in the middle of the night or when no one is around?”

Scout pulled a crumpled pack of smokes out of her pants and lit up, just before Nada yanked it away.

“You’re too young to smoke.”

“When is old enough?” Scout shot back. “It hasn’t been ten hours since you killed my neighbor’s dog. And you’re looking at a minefield over there, aren’t you? I saw the people he hired to put in the shrubbery.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Because no one ever believes me.” Scout said it simply. “They were the ones you hire off the corner at the gas station, not landscapers. And they did a lousy job, but they put in those bushes—”

“Shrubbery,” Nada interrupted, and she laughed before continuing.

“In the middle of the day in the exact spots where he had little stakes with red flags on them. I’ve lived here long enough that the placement made no sense from an aesthetic point of view. So I watched that night, and old Bluebeard crept out in the dark and he buried things in each of the mounds at the base of each.”

“Claymore mines most likely,” Nada said.

“You really think he put mines in?” Scout was surprised. “Even I started doubting me. ’Cause that’s real cray-cray.”

“Why do you call him Bluebeard?”

“Why not? Not like we’ve ever been formally introduced.”

Nada pulled two bent cigarettes from the pack and lit both, handing one to Scout.

“For Chrissakes, Nada.” Moms stood in the doorway.

“Did you get it?” Scout asked.

“We got it.”

“Did you destroy my bathroom?”

Moms grimaced. “There was some damage, but we’ll have Support here in less than an hour to fix it just like new.”

Scout smiled once more, transforming her into someone almost charming. “
Why ask for the moon when we have the stars
.”

That brought the hint of a smile to Moms’s face. “All right. If she knows this place as well as she knows her movies, she’s an Asset.”

“What’s the movie?” Nada asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Moms said.

“
Now, Voyager
,” Eagle announced over the net, because Eagle always had to fill the information void.

Moms tugged on the skirt once more.

“The skirt’s not too short,” Scout said. “You’re too tall for it. Doctor Cray-Cray was like five-six.”

“Got an extra cigarette?” Moms asked, sitting on the other side of Scout on the bench. “Kirk got himself a little burned, but nothing bad. New guys always screw something up on their first Firefly mission.”

Nada shook one almost bent in two out of the pack. He carefully rolled it between callused palms, lit it, then handed it to Moms.

“Two down. Four to go,” Moms said. Then she took a deep drag as the garage door opened and the team shot across the street and disappeared into the other house.

“Do I get paid?” Scout asked. “’Cause I really, really need a job, ’cause I figure I have to buy a new curling iron, you know? I’m so tired of babysitting.”

“People let you watch their kids?” Moms asked.

Nada took a last puff on the cig and then field-stripped it. “I’d let her watch my kids.”

“You don’t have kids,” Moms said.

“I’d let her watch Zoey,” Nada said.

“From what you’ve said of Zoey, she and Scout would get along just fine,” Moms said.

“Do I get a gun?” Scout asked, and Nada and Moms said in stereo: “No!”

Ivar was suspended in the golden glow emanating from the mainframe computer. He had no idea how long he’d been like this, but he’d already peed in his pants. Except that had happened when the golden glow initially pulsed out and wrapped around him. He was facing the steel door, because he’d been running for it as the glow expanded.

Thus he saw the door slowly swing open. The silhouette of a man was in the dark hallway outside. He had a gun in his hand, a very big gun.

The man stepped into the room and Ivar saw his face.

That was bad.

The man looked past Ivar, toward the mainframe. He stepped forward. Ivar wanted to yell, warn him not to, but he couldn’t speak.

The man stepped into the golden glow, but instead of being frozen in place like Ivar was, his body shivered, as if getting a jolt of energy. The man opened his mouth, wide, very wide, and inhaled. Ivar could swear that he was sucking in the golden glow.

Ms. Jones’s desk was getting disturbingly cluttered as Pitr placed objects on it in order. She knew the Nightstalkers thought her some sort of obsessive-compulsive about having a clean desk. Some thought she wasn’t even real, and they were correct in a way, since sometimes she really wasn’t in that chair in the office when they thought she was. None knew about Pitr, who entered and left through her private chambers behind the steel behind her desk, hidden in the shadows and never when the team was in the Den. She spent most of her time in the bed when she wasn’t talking to Moms and/or Nada or in-briefing a new member in her chambers. Even sitting was exhausting. On the really bad days she just used the holographic projector.

But she was real and she had a very specific reason for everything she did.

Right now Pitr had laid out the objects in the correct order in which she had to consider their connections:

The hard drive from the Fun Outside Tucson and the “fun” happening in North Carolina, delivered to Pitr by Support just minutes ago. It had initially been programmed by:

Henry Craegan’s file, including the taunting e-mail from him to:

Doctor Winslow’s file. How had:

Burns found out about the e-mail and the connection? His file lay there, too, along with:

The situation report via Moms from Senators Club, which was getting thicker with each secure e-mail and Satphone conversation transcription.

Ms. Jones immediately made one connection. “Burns learned of Winslow by accessing Craegan’s e-mail records on the hard drive.”

Pitr nodded.

“Still no word where Burns is?”

Pitr shook his head. “No. Support is on it.”

“What about the report from the University of Colorado Acme Asset?” Ms. Jones asked.

Pitr’s American accent was much better than hers, with barely a trace of his Russian roots. This was because he actually went out into the world and interacted with people away from the Ranch and Area 51. He was slightly younger than Ms. Jones, handsome in a rugged way with gray hair just starting to tinge his temples. His most distinguishing feature was his smile, revealing perfectly aligned white teeth and making him appear to be a person without a trouble in the world. Ms. Jones often believed it was that smile that had caused her to make the decision that changed everything back on April 26, 1986.

“The report was inconclusive,” Pitr said. “Worse, the Acme has disappeared. It might be a rather unsettling coincidence, except, of course, we don’t believe in coincidences.”

“No, we don’t.”

“But we had no record of a Rift there.”

“Perhaps Mister Burns had something to do with that disappearance to accelerate the movement of the hard drive back to
Area 51,” Ms. Jones said. “It had been scheduled for pickup a week later, so there was a shuffle in assignments. That’s why we got the initial Package report wrong and a rookie Courier ended up getting assigned a priority-one Package.”

“That’s likely.”

“Have Support follow up there,” Ms. Jones said. “Find out what happened to the Acme. Start with the student who signed the drive over to the Courier.”

Pitr leaned over her and adjusted the drip in one of the three IVs that fed into a shunt in her chest.

“The good news,” Pitr said, because Pitr always focused on good news—someone had to, “is that the Nightstalkers have finished off a third of the Fireflies and the Rift didn’t act abnormal as it did in Tucson.”

“That in itself is cause for concern,” Ms. Jones said. “First that it was different in Tucson and then it wasn’t different in North Carolina. Is it not the same program?”

“I don’t believe so,” Pitr said. “Doctor Winslow had time to work on it. He’s older, so we might assume he went the old way.”

Ms. Jones looked at her desk. “There’s five things there.”

“Ah,” Pitr shook his head. “You aren’t a believer in Doc’s Rule of Seven, are you?”

“He has a valid point,” Ms. Jones said. “I have often deconstructed the events which brought you and I together and changed our lives and they more than fit his theory.” Ms. Jones closed her eyes. “I must constantly remind myself of things, Pitr. Both good and bad. The Nightstalkers think I make speeches to remind them, but it’s as much to remind myself.” She lifted a hand, staring at the red scars and then pointing at Pitr. “You were so gallant when you flew your helicopter in to Chernobyl that early morning after the reactor blew.”

Pitr grimaced, not liking it when her mind went back to that time, because it would lead only one way. “You did all you could.”

“I did not and that is why we are here.” She sighed. “I worry about Nada and his Protocols. They followed Protocol that night.”

“They followed Protocol after already having made many mistakes,” Pitr corrected her. “It was the mistakes that caused the Protocol to go wrong. You were the only engineer there who kept telling them to stop. Who pointed out the mistakes they didn’t want to acknowledge.”