The Rook (7 page)

Creighton and Randi arrived at the warehouse’s expansive parking lot. He saw Randi sending a text message.

“Who’s that to?”

“My roommate. I’m telling her not to wait up for me.”

“That’s a good idea.”

She closed up the phone and set it down, then peered out the window. “Where are we? I thought we were going to your place?”

“I need to take care of something here first. Come on. I don’t want to leave you out here alone.”

“What are you talking about? What do you need to do here?”

He didn’t answer her, just opened his door. But as he did so, the cell phone in his pocket vibrated to life. He knew who it was right away. Only one person had this number. He retrieved the cell. “Yeah?”

“It’s time,” the electronically altered voice said. “We do it tonight.”

“What?” Creighton’s eyes danced over to Randi. “You can’t be serious.”

A pause. “You’re ready, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m ready. But we were set up to do it during the day. I need at least a few hours to find her and—”

Randi folded her arms. “To find who?”

“Shh,” he said.

“Who’s there?” asked Shade.

“It’s nothing,” Creighton said. “Listen, I’m telling you, tonight’s no good. I don’t like being rushed. The plan was to pick her up on her way home from work—”

Randi put away her makeup, then zippered her purse shut and set it on her lap. “Pick up who, Neville?”

Creighton turned the phone away from his mouth and glared at her. “Just a minute,” he hissed.

“Things have changed,” Shade said. “We do it now. Hunter’s on the run. Don’t let me down.”

The phone went dead and Creighton realized it was too tough to jam it into his pocket while he was sitting down. He set it beside him, between the seats.

“What’s going on?” asked Randi.

Creighton rubbed his rough fingers together. It seemed he needed to make a decision. “Let me think.”

“It’s another girl, isn’t it?”

“Quiet.”

Creighton weighed his options. Randi … Cassandra … Randi

… Cassandra … who should he give this night to?

“Who is she?” Randi asked.

Then Creighton made his decision and started the car. “We’re not going to my place. Something’s come up.”

“Oh?”

“Get out.”

Randi looked at the weary warehouse district stretching to the ocean. “I’m supposed to get out here? You’re not dumping me out here in the middle of nowhere!”

Creighton let his voice become a two-by-four. “Get out of the car.” He reached across her, cranked open the passenger side door.

She cussed loudly as she scrambled to grab her things, and then swung her legs outside. “I could have given you a good time.” He put a hand on her back, pushed her out the door. She staggered to her feet. “You don’t know what you’re missing!” “Neither do you.” Before she could close her door, he stamped on the gas, jerking the car forward, using the momentum to slam the door shut.

In the rearview mirror he saw her kick at the tire of the car as he sped past her. She was shaking her arm at him, yelling.

For a moment he was tempted to go back for her, to see just how good a time Randi with an “i” might have provided him. But no.

He had a job to do for Shade, and if he stuck to the plan, then he would soon die happily ever after.

But before that, an FBI agent would die too.

But not quite so happily.

Creighton needed to pick up a few things. He wanted to break the speed limit but was careful to keep all the traffic laws on his way to his condo to pick up the darts and the dart gun Shade had given him to use.

After all, you can never be too careful.

Victor Drake was irritated. And when he got irritated, he couldn’t sleep.

And when he couldn’t sleep, it only made him more irritated.

So, after laying wide awake in his bed for nearly two hours, he climbed out and plopped into the Jacuzzi in the glass-enclosed sunroom overlooking the ocean. He shut off the whirlpool’s jets so he could hear the high-def TV screen mounted on the wall beside his Monet, but then got annoyed at the sound and turned it down and simply watched the numbers of the Nikkei Stock Index scroll across the screen.

Just as he was beginning to relax, the guard at the front gate buzzed him.

Victor ignored the buzzer. All he wanted to do was unwind enough to go to sleep.

Another buzz.

Victor didn’t move.

Another.

He slammed his finger against the remote control, and the television screen split into two images, with the mute stock index on the right side and the live video feed of the guard station at the driveway’s entrance on the left.

“What!” yelled Victor.

“Senor, I have two men here who—”

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” Victor shot back.

“I know, senor. They are very insist—” “You don’t bother me unless—”

Another voice cut him off, and a face appeared on the screen next to the guard. “It’s Octal. I’ve got Geoff with me. We’re coming up.”

Victor’s fingers shook slightly and he dropped the remote control into the whirlpool. He cursed and fished it out, but by the time he’d retrieved it, he saw on the screen that Dr. Octal Kurvetek’s BMW

had cruised past the confused-looking guard and was on its way to the house. Victor decided to fire that useless rent-a-cop tomorrow, but for right now, he needed to deal with Geoff and the doctor.

They were never supposed to come here.

Never.

He’d made that very clear.

Victor switched off the television, stepped out of the tub, and dried himself off. A few moments later, before he had time to finish getting dressed, he heard the footsteps of the two men on the stairs.

He knew he’d locked the front door earlier, but that hadn’t seemed to slow Geoff down one bit. Victor cinched his bathrobe around his waist and stalked out of the master bedroom.

The two men were waiting for him in the hall.

“What are you doing here?” His voice was seething. “I told you never to—”

“I know what you said.” Geoff was an immobile mountain of a man with a broad nose that looked right at home mounted on his bulky face. “But this is important.”

The other man stood beside him quietly. A gray-bearded man in his sixties with cool, piercing eyes, Dr. Octal Kurvetek had worked for twenty years for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the supervising physician for the executions by lethal injection.

He’d always made Victor nervous, but his skills had made him the perfect man for the job Victor had hired him to do.

Victor tore his eyes off Dr. Kurvetek and glared at Geoff. “Well, what is it? And this better be good.” “There was a slight problem.” Geoff’s face registered no emotion.

“What kind of problem?”

“Hunter never showed up,” Dr. Kurvetek added.

“What?” gasped Victor. “He didn’t show up? How could he not show up?”

“The subject reacted unexpectedly,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “And the police were called in.”

“And?” Victor demanded.

“Obvious suicide,” said Geoff. “Hunter probably bolted.”

“We kept an eye on the scene, but even after everyone left, he didn’t come,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “We went to his apartment but he wasn’t there either. His drawers are a mess. It looks like he left in a hurry. I thought that instead of calling you on the phone we should discuss this in person.”

Victor tried to connect the dots. It was hard to tell how much Hunter knew. He hadn’t been told much, but it was almost certainly enough to hurt them if he decided to talk to the authorities.

Plus General Biscayne would be arriving on Thursday.

No, no, this couldn’t be happening. Not now.

“Where’s Suricata?”

“At Hunter’s,” said Geoff. “Case he comes back.”

Victor let all this sink in for a moment. If anything happened to the device and the Project Rukh Oversight Committee found out about it, Drake Enterprises would lose its defense department contract. And then the investigations would begin. “And, you took care of the—”

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “It’s safely tucked away at the base. We did that first.”

This was one time Victor was glad he’d put Octal on the books so that he could receive unlimited access to Building B-14, but still he didn’t want to think about any of this. His head was beginning to hurt. It was all too much. But at least the device was secure. He needed a drink. “Take care of the house, and find Hunter. Call me when you know more. Let’s rein this in. No more loose ends.”

The two men left the house and Victor went searching for his bottle of pills.

It only took Creighton five minutes to gather the necessary items from his condo. Even though he didn’t like the idea of having to move on this so quickly—and he was more than a little ticked off at having to say good-bye to Randi—now that everything was in play his adrenaline was jacked up and that was something he liked very much.

After loading the darts in the hydraulic-powered dart gun, he left to find Cassandra Lillo, the woman he’d already started to think of as his next girlfriend.

Tuesday, February 17

5:10 a.m.

I rose before dawn for a jog. Tessa would be asleep for another three or four hours, so it gave me a chance to be alone, think through the events of the previous night and not feel guilty about splitting my attention between her and my work.

The wind had calmed down but left the morning cool enough to warrant sweatpants. Despite all that had happened the night before, after twenty-five minutes of running I felt my mind clearing.

Last night, when I’d returned to the hotel and tapped on Tessa’s door, Lien-hua had stepped into the hall and told me that Tessa was asleep.

“Is she doing all right?” I’d asked Lien-hua.

“I believe so. Yes. But I thought it would be best to stay with her, anyway, until you arrived.”

It seemed like there might be something else on her mind. “Are you OK?”

“Just processing some things. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow. I need some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, OK?”

There was more to be said, but it wasn’t going to happen that late at night. After I’d thanked her again and she’d left for her room, I began to wonder if maybe Tessa had said something to her. Maybe John Doe’s suicide had been harder on Tessa than I thought. If so, my plans for the week might have to take a dra-matic detour. As dawn arrived, a streak of high cirrus clouds drifted above me, and early morning sunlight squeezed out the night. But with the day came the heat. In contrast to last night, it seemed like God had dialed the thermostat for Southern California up all the way the moment he sent the sun to awaken the city.

I came to an intersection, saw a sign for Bryson Heights High School, and wondered if they might have a track or a fitness trail. I jogged toward the school, found that they didn’t have a track, but they did have a football field. And that was good news because football goals meant I could crank out some pull-ups.

I found the goalposts, jumped up, grabbed the horizontal bar, and it felt good to get into the rhythm. Up. Down.

Up.

Down.

When I was nineteen I worked for a year as a wilderness guide and I fell in love with rock climbing; and the best way to stay in shape for the crags is doing pull-ups. At first a couple hundred pull-ups a day was impossible—I could barely do ten. But over the years, I’ve worked my way up, and, after more than four thousand days of doing them, pull-ups come almost as natural as walking.

Up.

Down.

I squeezed out a set of forty, took a breather, and then tried flying solo with my left arm. The homeless guy’s bite didn’t affect my arm as much as I thought it might, but with every pull-up I could still feel it sting.

Up.

I thought of him. Bewildered. Raving. Losing his life. All so meaningless. So tragic.

Down.

Most of the time I try to focus on the positive impact that my work at the NCAVC has, but sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. Up. The majority of people who’ve ever lived on our planet have led short, difficult, brutal lives and then died before their dreams could come true.

Down. People like Sylvia Padilla and that man last night and Christie, my wife who passed away last year, taking all of our plans for the future with her.

Up. It’s tragic and pointless, but it’s the way the world is.

Down. We live in a country where television newscasters are allowed to get excited about the score of a baseball game but aren’t allowed to show emotion or remorse while reporting a homicide, a suicide bombing, or a rape.

Up.

Down. That’s our world.

Enough with the left. Only managed nine. Time for the right.

Sweating, sweating. Today would be a scorcher.

Every time I pulled my chin toward the goalpost, I was able to glimpse the stoic ships in the harbor and catch the glisten of sunlight on the ocean. Without last night’s anxious wind, the sea was early morning still.

Up.

Coronado Island stared at me from the bay. The island was a study in contrasts, with thousands of naval personnel living in anonymous-looking barracks right across the street from some of the most expensive real estate in the world; and of course one of America’s most lush hotels, the Hotel del Coronado, lay only a quarter mile from the Spartan living conditions of the Navy SEAL Amphibious Training Base.

Down.

I snagged eleven with my right arm. It’s my stronger arm, anyway.

I could feel the burn. I did as many sets as I could until my arms were blown out, and the bandage on my left forearm began to get soaked with something other than sweat. So I started my jog again.

This time I chose a path that took me along the beach.

The water beside me seemed so still, so tame in the dawning day, so different from last night. A few timid waves tiptoed across the surface, just enough to keep the ocean from becoming an endless sheet of glass.

And if I didn’t know what went on deep beneath those ripples, I probably would have felt a sense of calm. But I’d been scuba diving enough to know the truth: deep beneath the surface, in the places where the sun’s light will never reach, lies a whole different world.

Even on days like this, when the surface looked peaceful and serene, dark currents, swift and strong, were snaking endlessly through the depths. Never tiring. Never resting. Always, always on the move.

As I ran beside the paradoxical ocean, I couldn’t help but think of my walk with Tessa last night.

Both eerie and beautiful.

And then I thought of John Doe’s suicide.

It was only another mile or so to the trolley tracks where he died. I decided to cruise past the scene, see if I noticed anything different in the daylight.

As I crossed Kettner Boulevard, I could hear the Orange Line approaching, so I knew that the trolleys were running again.

Life moving on.

Soon, the people of San Diego would be listening to their mp3

players, sipping their lattes, and deciding what movie to see this weekend, as they rode the trolleys to work, oblivious to the dark stain on the tracks beneath them.

Just six more blocks. Sunlight blazing. The day had come in at full force. It would probably hit eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit today. Maybe more.

Life is a puzzle to me with its moments of inexpressible joy and its seasons of heart-wrenching pain—sunlight dancing on the surface while the deadly currents roam below.

Suffering comes crashing into our lives and then washes away and we find a way to go on. Or we don’t. Some people don’t.

I rounded the block.

It’s a balancing act. You want tragedy to hurt, you need it to hurt, because once it stops hurting, the part of you that matters most becomes hollow and numb. Part of being human is letting life hurt.

But on the other hand, if it hurts too much, if you get caught dwelling on the meaninglessness and suffering, you can drown in it.

I’ve seen people get jaded and I’ve seen them pull apart at the seams.

Either extreme, you lose. I haven’t figured out how to strike the balance in my own life yet, but I know this much—every time the dark currents rise to the surface, they take a little of my optimism back with them into the abyss.

Only three more blocks.

At two blocks I began to catch the scent of scorched wood.

At one block I saw a hazy layer of smoke hovering above the pavement.

It couldn’t be.

I came to the corner of K Street and 15th and I froze. My skin felt clammy and cool, even as the day blazed to life around me.

Gray smoke smudged the morning, curling up from the blackened shell of a charred but still structurally intact two-story home.

The house lay directly across the street from where the homeless man had appeared last night—less than one city block from where I’d parked and tried to predict the future.

I stood staring at the smoldering ruins, trying to catch my breath, trying to process what this might mean.

If a crowd had been there earlier, it had dispersed, and instead a few tired-looking firefighters lingered by their truck. Beside them, I noticed Lien-hua and Lieutenant Aina Mendez walking toward the cooling remains of the home.

After allowing myself a brief glance at a certain section of freshly scrubbed track, I jogged over to join them.