When he got off the plane into the dark Chicago midnight, he knew the danger would be after clearing customs, after walking toward his rental car, that the Night Road could be waiting for him.
He could not shake Henry from his thoughts. Let him know abandonment, let him feel what it was like to have your life taken from you and wadded up like trash.
He walked toward the rental car station. He kept glancing over his shoulder, because whether it was Quicksilver or the Night Road, they had known how to find him when he traveled. To trap him. Not again. He signed off the rental car paperwork, using the false ID and credit card Drummond had left him. He walked out into the parking garage and found his car on the top level. The attendant had him inspect the car for pre-existing damage, and sign the form. He barely looked at the rental, a Lincoln Navigator SUV, and scrawled his false passport name on the paper.
The attendant said, ‘One second, I’ll get you the keys.’ He vanished into the office and when the door opened again it wasn’t the attendant, it was Frankie Wu, the pilot who had flown him and Aubrey to Chicago for Quicksilver.
Luke froze. Glanced around. All the attendants seemed to have disappeared.
‘Are you all right?’ Frankie Wu asked.
‘Yes.’
He’s part of Quicksilver, he’ll help me
, Luke thought. Luke wouldn’t have to do this alone.
‘Let’s get in the car,’ Frankie said, gently. ‘We can talk about your dad.’
Wu got behind the wheel. The passenger seat was full of gear, and Wu didn’t move it, so Luke sat in the back.
They got in the Navigator, drove out of the garage - Luke noticed that the guard at the exit simply waved Frankie Wu through, no checking of the rental car papers - and into the darkness.
‘My dad. I have to go help my dad,’ Luke said. ‘You have to help me.’
‘No, Luke,’ Wu said, ‘I have my orders. We don’t engage with the Night Road. I’m sorry.’
‘How did you find me?’ Luke asked. His voice sounded small in the quiet of the car.
‘You traveled under the ID Drummond got for you. We get a ping every time you use it. Especially after Paris was charged with recovering you and the office got blown the hell up.’ Anger stormed Wu’s voice.
‘Then be mad at the Night Road. They attacked your offices, in New York and Paris.’
‘We’ve lost a lot of good people because of you.’
‘Because of a traitor inside Quicksilver. A British woman who called herself Jane. I don’t know what her real name was. But she’s the one who’s put the Night Road and Quicksilver at each other’s throats, she was behind my kidnapping, killing Allen Clifford in Houston, trying to steal the Night Road’s money.’
‘What matters is us surviving another day to fight them. They’ve taken out two of our centers trying to kill you. You matter to them. So it’s my job, and my only job, to get you somewhere safe. Another team will arrive soon to help me.’
Frustration was a claw in Luke’s chest. ‘That will be too late. You have to help me
now
. They’re here. They’re planning a massive bombing attack, maybe on shopping centers, maybe on some other target. They have dozens of bombs ready. We can’t wait, we have to act now.’
Wu looked at him in the rearview with a gaze cold as chrome. ‘I have my orders. Get you to a safe place where you can be protected and debriefed about the Night Road.’
‘You don’t understand. They have my father. They have my friend. They’ve brought them here.’
‘I have my orders. I’m sorry. I’m just one guy.’ Wu steered onto a highway.
‘For God’s sakes. Please. Aren’t you part of the CIA or something? You can’t be just one guy left.’
Wu didn’t answer.
‘Listen to me.’ He told Wu how Paris had gone wrong. ‘They’re here, within our grasp. They’ve kept my dad alive to pick his brain about Quicksilver, and don’t doubt for a second they will torture him within an inch of his life. And they’re keeping Aubrey alive to access Eric’s accounts at the bank; they think she can help them get inside the bank since she’s a client. If they find this fifty million, they can fund terrorists all over America, they can wreak a hell of a lot more havoc. Terrorism is cheap, they can fund an endless chaos, far more than we’ve ever seen before. They’ve got an Arab billionaire investing in domestic terrorism. Don’t you realize how dangerous they are?’
‘The last thing I can do with Quicksilver in tatters is to attack alone.’
‘You have me.’
‘You. No. You’re not trained.’
‘I’ve held my own.’
‘It would be suicide.’
‘Then let me call the police,’ Luke said, ‘Tell them.’
‘Tell them what?’
‘I have information on a massive attack that the Night Road is planning. They’re massing here in Chicago, to distribute dozens of bombs to their members but I don’t know which cities they’ll hit.’
‘No evidence. No certainty. And you tell them about this, you have to tell them about Quicksilver. I’m not authorized.’
‘There could be thousands of lives at stake. Tens of thousands. I don’t care if you get exposed.’
‘I’m not authorized. I’m just one guy.’
Just one guy. ‘Quicksilver. What exactly is it?’
Frankie Wu said, ‘Quicksilver? Just an element. Just another name for the fleet-footed god Mercury.’
‘Yeah, you all are real fleet right now.’ Luke lifted his Saint Michael’s medal from his shirt. ‘You wear one?’
‘Yeah,’ Wu said, but he didn’t take his hands off the wheel.
‘Why Saint Michael?’
‘When people in the Roman Empire stopped worshipping Mercury, a number of his temples were rededicated to Saint Michael - a symbol of good overcoming evil.’
His father must have been thinking about starting Quicksilver before the Book Club was wiped out. ‘The successor to the Book Club. Thinking in new ways about how to fight threats. Except Quicksilver is much more about the fight, not the theory.’
‘What ever you say.’
‘My father belonged to a secret State Department think-tank called the Book Club. So did my stepfather and Drummond and the guy who died in Houston.’
He waited for Frankie Wu to speak but Wu just arched an eyebrow.
‘So. The Book Club kept predicting with accuracy how the world was changing but kept getting ignored and pushed aside due to political concerns; no one wanted to give credence to a bunch of eggheads who weren’t part of the power structure. But someone knew about the Book Club, and knew my dad was right. Maybe someone in State who’d moved to CIA. Dad got a better job offer and decided to play dead. Maybe to do what he was already doing, concepting and identifying forthcoming threats. The government finally decided to give him a real job. One that no one could know about. The CIA isn’t supposed to operate on American soil …’
Frankie Wu shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. We’re not CIA.’
He thought of the papers he’d seen in the Paris apartment before the bomb blast incinerated everything. The memos, the reports, all were old State Department, not new, annotated to reflect new thoughts, new threats, the notes in the memo. The relatively minor costs of attacks, compared to their huge inflicted economic damage. He remembered the account of the pipeline bombing a few days before in Canada: a few thousand for the explosives, but millions in unrecoverable economic damage.
It was very cheap to wage highly effective war on the infrastructure of civilization.
What had Drummond said?
Quicksilver grew out of our earlier work, a new way to fight the bad guys, to stop terrorism before it starts, to bring new thinking to the problem
.
A new way.
And after those attacks, we are simply supposed to trust that government will do its job. Protect us. That the various governments of the world, and their multitude of agencies, with their well-intentioned but million moving parts, handcuffed by law and order, will shift into a hitherto unseen efficiency and suddenly develop all the human capital and infrastructure to fight and eliminate every shadow and nutcase, every asshole with a laptop and an agenda
.
Uneasiness settled into Luke’s chest. ‘I get it. Quicksilver is funded by private industry. Not any government.’
Frankie Wu met his gaze in the rearview. ‘Should the world’s most powerful companies just sit and wait to get bloodied again? Trust law enforcement and the military and the government to win every battle in a shadowy war? The good guys need help beyond political donations. Help not constrained by legal bureaucracy or political expediency that tries to fight global terrorism like it’s the West versus the Soviets or the Nazis again. It’s not two armies battling each other. It’s not even nations battling each other. It’s networks of people battling each other.’ Wu leaned back. ‘Which is basically the same as corporate warfare, except this time with guns. Your father was a genius.’
Was. Like he was dead again.
‘He was the real brains behind the Book Club. Your stepfather was just a wannabe, an opportunistic coat-tailer. And while your father took his philosophy to help those who want peace and stability and trade, your stepfather signed on with the opposite team.’
‘Henry thinks he predicted 9/11,’ Luke said. ‘And that no one listened to him.’
Wu snorted. ‘Jesus and Mary, man. Do you think if anyone had written a detailed forecast of 9/11, it would have been ignored? I saw his paper; Drummond sent it to us all when this hell started breaking loose, as part of a psych profile of Henry Shawcross. It was vague in the extreme; he only suggested the possibility that jetliners could be weapons, and he never identified specific targets or groups that could carry it out. Henry Shawcross convinced himself - and only himself - that he was the ignored prophet who could save the world and then got pissed when no one paid attention to him. He’s crazy.’ Wu shook his head. ‘With the bad guys is the only place a man like Shawcross could be a star.’
Quicksilver. A private CIA for the world’s most powerful corporations. Luke could see it, money funneled carefully into security initiatives or perhaps hidden inside fat corporate contracts. Or research. It would be comparatively cheap insurance; fund and field a group of operatives who worked beyond the law to fight terrorists. The operations cost might well be less than the economic damage they would suffer in another cataclysmic attack. You could hide just enough financing, spread out among enough of the companies most sensitive to terrorism. And even if such a group couldn’t be entirely invisible to governments - would they turn a blind eye? Perhaps governments would even offer subtle or implicit support. Another army to fight the rising darkness, one with its hands not tied so closely by bureaucracy, could be a help. Or a disaster.
‘You all aren’t legal.’
‘No. But, until now, we get the job done.’
‘Until now,’ Luke said. ‘Now you’re all too scared to fight back.’
‘What exactly were you planning to trade for your dad?’ Wu asked. ‘They weren’t just going to give him to you.’
‘Trade? Get real. I was just going to kill them and get my dad and my friend back.’ Luke spoke with a matter-of-factness that would have appalled him a week ago. But he meant what he said.
‘Are you suicidal?’
‘No,’ Luke said quietly. ‘But I helped build the Night Road. My stepfather tricked me, but the Night Road exists as a network because of me. I have to stop them.’
‘We have to think big picture,’ Wu said.
‘Big picture?’ He remembered the words often in his father’s mouth. ‘How’s this for a big picture. They are launching a huge attack.’ He checked his watch. ‘The planning meeting for the attack is taking place right now. You can decapitate their organization, but only if you act,’ Luke said, his voice rising.
‘As you said, you helped build the Night Road. You can help us reconstruct who’s involved, where they might be. We can’t risk losing you in an ill-planned attack on a terrorist cell. We’ll hide you. Find a way to put you to use. You know them better than anyone, you’re a valuable resource.’
Which meant walking away from his life. Leaving it all behind.
He believed Wu. Quicksilver was not bound by law. He had no idea if they were bound by decency, although he wanted to believe that any group his father had a hand in founding would be guided by good.
‘Please. Please. I need to help my dad. You may never get another opportunity to take down Mouser. And thousands of lives are at stake …’
‘Orders say no.’
‘Screw your orders. I thought you were supposed to be nimble and fast and responsive. Well, I’m handing you these assholes on a plate and you’re too afraid.’
The stubbornness - bureaucratic idiocy - frustrated him. He gave Wu the details of the rendezvous at Aubrey’s office; it made no difference.
‘I won’t tell you a thing I know about the Night Road unless you help my dad.’
Wu acted like he hadn’t spoken.
‘What is wrong with you? You’re no better than the bureaucrats you claim to replace,’ Luke said. ‘At the least, call the police or the FBI, tell them that Mouser and these bad guys will be there.’
Wu said, ‘That would expose us, potentially, but I’ll consider it.’
Luke heaved back in the seat in complete frustration.
He glanced at his watch.
I’m only one guy
, Wu had said. Well, so was Luke. And he had made it this far. Sometimes one person had to be enough to make a difference.
He lapsed into silence and conjured up a half-baked plan. Drummond told him not to get cornered. Wu was a trained Quicksilver operative, and who knew what that meant? Ex-CIA or ex-FBI or maybe just a guy who wasn’t afraid of trouble if he was paid enough. He was trained to fight. So Luke would have to be smarter.
Scare him in a way he wasn’t expecting.
‘I have a confession,’ he said.
Wu glanced at him. ‘What?’
‘I’m not going with you.’ Luke threw open the Navigator’s door. At sixty miles an hour.
‘What the hell?’ Wu yelled. ‘Get the hell back in here.’
Luke stood in the open doorway, firming a grip on the Navigator’s roof.
Wu wasn’t slowing down.