“Is she okay?” Emily’s voice.
“I want to talk to my granddaughter.” Mom approached, hand out for the receiver. My pulse beat in my throat. If I fought her, she could have a meltdown. She was tired enough. I could not risk her screams attracting attention from the customers getting gas. I thrust the phone into her hand. “Do it quickly, we have to go.”
Mom took the phone in her gnarled fingers. Pressed the black plastic to her white head. “Emily?”
“Hi, Grand.” I could just make out Emily’s words. “You okay?”
“Awful tired. We’re running, you know. From the Bad People. They want to hurt Morton’s daughter in Raleigh. We have to get to her first and warn her. But it sure is tiring.”
“Oh. Well, you do everything Mom tells you, okay? She knows what she’s doing.”
Yeah. Right.
I glanced around the station’s parking area, then across the street. One car pulled away from a pump; another one pulled in behind. And here we stood, with our lit-up car. Who talked on pay phones anymore? Didn’t we look out of place, just using the thing?
“Okay.” Mom’s voice wavered. “How are you, sweetie? You found a new boyfriend yet?”
I winced.
“No, Grand. I’m gonna take my time on this one.”
“Problem is, you’re just too good for all the men out there. They can’t hold a candle to you.”
“Thanks.”
Mom sighed. Such exhaustion in that sound. “I need to go now. We’ll talk again soon.”
“Okay. Love you.”
Mom handed the phone back to me, satisfied. I couldn’t help but snatch it from her fingers. “Go sit in the car, please. And close the door so the light won’t be on.”
Amazingly, she obeyed.
The line clicked. An automated voice told me to put in more money. I blew out a breath in frustration, then rummaged for the coins and shoved them in. “Emily, hello?”
“I’m here. Mom! Go to the police!”
“I have to think about this first. If Harcroft or Wade is working with these terrorists, and I ask the police for protection—I’m dead. You understand that? The first thing the police will do is contact those two men. This is their case. I
have
to be sure.”
Emily sighed. “Well, think it through in a hurry, okay?”
She still didn’t get it. But how could I expect her to? She hadn’t seen what I had.
The February chill bit through my coat. My head throbbed, and the unfamiliar phone in my sweaty hand spun a feeling of abandonment through me.
How in the world had I gotten to this place?
“Mom, you hear me?”
“Yes. I’ll call you again in a few hours.”
“Please be careful. I’m so scared.”
“I will. I love you.”
I hung up the phone, the sudden break in connection with my daughter slicing through me. As I started the car seconds later I fought the overwhelming terror that I would never speak to her again.
F
ive-thirty a.m.—and Roz had still not shown up. And he wasn’t answering his cell phone. Stone had spent the last half-hour pacing, swearing, and kicking the furniture. Why had he sent anyone else to that woman’s house? He should have done the job himself. Except that he’d needed to be on the phone to other FreeNow members scattered across the country. Now that they were below the twenty-four-hour mark, no one in the organization was sleeping.
His cell rang. Stone snatched it up and saw Tex’s ID. Some time ago he’d contacted Tex—“Agent Rutger”—and told him to look for Roz. “Yeah?”
“He’s disappeared. No sign of him anywhere. Or his car.”
Stone’s fingers fisted. Another traitor among them. What if there were more?
“Get’s worse,” Tex said.
What could be worse at this point? “Yeah?”
“There are no bodies at Hannah Shire’s house.”
Stone let that sink in. “Maybe he got rid of them.”
“No time. Police got a shots-fired call. They were there fast.”
“What? Why didn’t he use a silencer?”
“I don’t know. He has one.”
Stone tipped his shaved head toward the ceiling. Shots fired—and no bodies? “Where are the women?”
“Disappeared too. They took off in her car.”
Stone’s heart jolted. He put a hand to his temple. This could not be happening. “They got
away
?”
“Looks like it.”
Stone sat down hard on his couch. Roz had sounded strange when he called. Like he was having trouble breathing. Had Hannah Shire shot him with her own weapon? That would explain the neighbors hearing it.
What kind of woman
was
this?
“Police found blood drops in the house,” Tex said. “Good news is, local cops don’t have a clue what’s going on.”
She must have shot Roz. Stone dropped his chin. That was a major loss. Roz and Tex were Stone’s own recruits, allowed to work directly beneath him. Those kinds of men were hard to find, needing that certain balance of deep discontent and a thrumming drive to fill their souls with purpose. Roz was older, more mature. But Tex was intelligent as well as burning loyal.
What happened? How had Roz let the two women escape?
Whatever the case, Hannah Shire and her mother were alive.
Stone thought back to Roz’s phone call. Talk about lies. The man had to know even then he wasn’t coming in. He’d better run like a desert jackrabbit. No place on this earth could hide him now. FreeNow traitors all met the same end.
Stone cursed. “I don’t want to think what could happen if those women know too much and go to the wrong people.”
Meanwhile the clock ticked.
“Let me go after them,” Tex said. “We should have killed them right away. I won’t let them get away this time.”
Stone grunted. Tex had already killed Nooley for the man’s failure to get the video back and silence Leringer in time. Tex had shown no hesitation at the order. But to one hundred percent redeem himself, he needed to fix his own mistake.
“I’m sure you won’t let them get away again.” Stone kept his voice low. “You got twelve hours to track them down and beat out of them everything they know. Then kill them. And Tex?”
“Yeah?”
“Fail me, and you’re dead.”
E
mily’s coworkers began arriving at the TriPoint Marketing offices around 8:00. She paid little attention. Since her mother’s phone call she’d been researching Morton Leringer. Like her mom said, Leringer owned a lot of businesses under his umbrella corporation. But what was his connection to Raleigh? She couldn’t find anything on that. And she didn’t see anything that made him sound like a terrorist. Why would he want to hurt the country that had made him so rich?
Her muscles were like rocks, and her hand all cramped from holding the mouse too hard. Every minute that passed made her more worried about her mom and Grand. Were they safe at the hotel? Was somebody in the sheriff’s department really out to get them?
Emily heard people greeting each other, making coffee.
A big-shot like Leringer would make news if he was murdered. Emily searched CNN.com for the story. A video with a frozen picture of Morton Leringer on a stage caught her eye. It had been posted a few hours ago. She clicked
Play.
Leringer began to move, his audio turned off. Emily stared at the man her mother had tried to help.
“Morton Leringer, owner and CEO of ML Corporation,” said the voice-over, “died in the emergency room of a Moss Beach, California hospital yesterday as a result of a stab wound. The coroner has ruled the manner of death as homicide. Police later searched his nearby home in Half Moon Bay, on the Pacific coast below San Francisco, and discovered a second victim—Nathan Eddington, age forty-eight. Eddington was an employee of StarrCom, a Bay-Area-based security company owned by ML Corporation.”
Emily leaned forward, mouth open. The video showed a body bag being carried out through a huge front door and down porch steps.
“The homicides are being investigated by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Coastside Patrol Bureau, which serves over sixty percent of the county, including Half Moon Bay. The Moss Beach Substation is the largest law enforcement facility on the coast, staffed with twenty-seven full-time deputy sheriffs, four sergeants, and one lieutenant. So far the substation has not asked for outside help with its investigation. And they are speaking little to the media, saying only that they are following leads.”
The video ended. Emily stared at her monitor, thoughts whirling. StarrCom. A security company.
What kind of security?
Hunched over the keyboard, she searched for the company’s website and jumped to the home page.
“StarrCom Security,” read the header. “Keeping the World Safe.” Emily leaned back in her chair, gaze fixed on her desk. Had Nathan Eddington, through the company’s own security, discovered a terrorist plot to take out power stations?
Whoever was behind this had killed two people already. And they’d tried to kill two more.
Where
were Mom and Grand?
“Hey, Emily!”
She jumped. A long, lean face grinned down at her from above her cubicle wall. Dave Raines, her mentor.
“Whoa.” Dave raised his Groucho Marx eyebrows. “Too much coffee already?”
Emily shook her head.
Dave eyed her. “What’s up?”
She hesitated. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Depends on how much you pay me.”
“I need you to look at a video. Just lasts a minute.” She thought she may have seen more pixelation toward the beginning but couldn’t be sure.
“Okay.”
“But on your computer. You’ve got better software.”
“Let’s go.” Dave gestured with his head.
“Thanks. Let me copy it to a flash drive first.”
“All right.” Her mentor disappeared.
Emily copied the file, then snatched up the piece of paper on which she’d written the long sequence of numbers and letters from the video. She hurried into Dave’s office.
“There’s noise at the end,” she told him as he put in the flash drive. “Looks like an encrypted message. I wrote down the sequence.”
“What? Who’s your client, the CIA?”
“Not a client.”
He eyed her.
“But now I’m wondering if there’s something at the beginning. Just a little flash. I can’t enhance it enough to tell.”
“Okay. Let’s see what we got.” Dave pressed the Play arrow.
Emily leaned over his shoulder and watched with him. “There’s no audio.”
As it started, Dave stiffened. He leaned closer, watching closely. At the end he gave her a hard look. “You have any idea what this is?”
She looked away. How much to tell him? “Maybe a power generator?”
“It
is
a power generator. A very sick one.”
“How do you know?”
“My father worked for a power company.”
“Oh.” Dave’s father had died a year ago. “Didn’t know that.”
“I’ve seen these machines up close. This kind of machine controls an entire power station. But something’s made this generator go out of control.”
Right. Just like she’d seen in that CNN video. “Would that . . . so what would happen?”
“The station goes out. Which means millions of people lose power.”
Emily rubbed her arms. “Could it be fixed quickly?”
Dave stared at the monitor. “This doesn’t look good. Where’d you get this, Emily?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“If this is real, it wouldn’t be like some wire going down. It could cause what my dad called a cascade effect. If a central power station goes dark, it can take another one down nearby. Which takes another one down, and on and on. A whole region could go black.”
Emily sucked in her bottom lip.
Dave turned to look her in the eye. “Where’d you get this?”
“I . . . someone gave it to my mom.”
“Your mom. Why?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
Dave’s gaze would not waver. “You look scared to death.”
No kidding.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
Emily swallowed. Her mom hadn’t wanted her pulled into this. Now she understood. She felt the same about Dave. “Please. For now, can you just . . . Did you see the static at the beginning?”
Dave gave her another long look. “Yes. At the left side, bottom, about three seconds in.”
Emily’s nerves wavered. “I need to know what it says.”
Dave nodded. “So do I. Then you’re going to tell me what this is all about.”
B
ack in the hotel I could not sleep. Mom had crawled beneath the covers of her bed, still clothed, and dozed off right away. I lay on top of my bed staring at the ceiling.
What should I do?
The question spun around inside me until I thought I would go mad. The wrong decision could cost us our lives.
And meanwhile terrorists just might be planning to attack the electrical grid somewhere in America. If that was true, how long from now? How could they be stopped?
I might have
killed
a man.
The thought hit me like a rogue wave. What if I did? Me, who worked with a doctor. We
saved
lives.
But that man could have killed my mother. I’d do anything to protect her.
I didn’t have to shoot him in the
chest
.
What had I done? He could be somebody’s husband. Father. Had I taken away a woman’s
husband
?
Tears filled my eyes and ran down my temples. Jeff wouldn’t have wanted me to kill someone. Not really. Just protect myself.
Thou shalt not kill
. One of the Ten Commandments I’d never expected to break. How did I even ask for forgiveness for something as terrible as that?
I rolled over on my side, sick in my stomach.
God, forgive me. I didn’t want to kill him! Please let him live. Let the police find him and take him to jail, away from me and Mom. But let him live.
How could I have done all this? In one day I’d lied to a sheriff’s deputy, then tried—maybe succeeded—to kill a man. How could the honest, peaceful person I’d been all my life cross such a line, just like that?
Guilt poured over me, glazed with fear of the unknown. What would I have to do next? What might I descend to?
I tried to pray again but couldn’t do much more than plead for help. And demand answers.
God, why are You doing this to me? Isn’t it enough that I lost Jeff?