Resurrection Express (26 page)

“No.”

“I’ll be okay.”

He doesn’t tell me the passwords to get into the computer system. I almost wonder why. He turns on one heel and leaves me lying there in the half dark. His boots do a creaky
clop-clop-clop
up the rickety stairs. The steel door slams.

I get up and sit on the concrete floor, trying to focus.

Trying to put it together.

There are so many things that don’t make sense, and my mind is still too fuzzy. I concentrate hard and try to see past the white noise, to see Toni’s face, to find the calm she taught me, to remember what her voice sounded like. All I get back is the old sharp pain and the weird flower smell, made even worse by the hangover. But the drug warp is receding. The shower helped. The new clothes are like a fresh skin. I can feel strong potions guest-starring in my bloodstream, backing the sickness off.

I try to bring the rage again, but it hurts too much.

No hurry. Just think. Think hard.

Focus.

Toni . . . was that really you on the phone in that bar?

Did you leave your number with that bartender, knowing those goons would be there to kill me? And why did Jenison leave herself wide open for an ambush like that? Why didn’t they just grab me and start cutting my fingers off in a dark room?

Answer: Jenison knew I wouldn’t crack under that kind of questioning. She knew about my training. My ability to guide myself out of anything, just by putting my mind there. They had to trick me into giving it up. They had to destroy what makes me tick.

But there are so many other questions.

Kim Hammer was the first one they hit. She would have told them everything she knew about me. They could have killed her and everyone else working for her easy. That’s how they found me—at least that’s what Jenison said. I have to look into that. Gotta know for sure if Kim’s off the street.

I know I must have talked about Franklin. They would have known how to contact him. They’ll be looking for him now, for all of his buddies.

I have to assume this location is secure for just another twenty-four hours, tops. If these guys don’t decide to help me fast enough, I’m stealing a car and going it alone. The big question that hangs over everything is this:

Did I tell them about my backup plan while I was under the serum—about hiding the last piece of the puzzle in that parking garage, along with the rest of my money from Kim Hammer’s deal?

Did I really give them what they asked me for?

The system they’re hunting won’t work unless they have all seventeen discs, like the one I stashed in the Gold’s Gym bag. The one currently sitting in the trunk of the car Kim sold me. Maybe it’s still there. They might have found the car by now. Jenison’s people are smart.

Did I tell her everything?

I concentrate hard to remember if I did. It doesn’t seem that way. I guide every last ounce of brainpower I possess into that memory:

Sitting in front of her.

Talking about action movies.

Thinking I was dead game.

I sure as hell told her
something
.

She asked me whom I’d spoken to, and I may well have given her Franklin’s name. But I don’t think I said a word about my insurance policy. If Franklin was telling the truth, only he knows where the rest of the discs are. I wouldn’t have been able to give them the location. I can only hope I’m still operating from strength.

It’s all one big mess and I have to move really fast now.

•  •  •

T
he Weasel’s computer isn’t encrypted at all. It doesn’t even have a password. My new playmates must figure on nobody being able to get past the steel door up the stairwell. Anyone could spy on them through a wire. This is a sloppy system. I check for blackware and virus infection programs. I’ll need them if I want to go deep into the underground without leaving a slime trail. They have some stuff, but it’s dated. I’m taking a risk. Everything’s a risk now.

Screw it all.

The first thing I do is sneak into some houses—a few shooters, well-known guns. Street mechanics who would know about Kim Hammer. Those guys all communicate silently, through private IMs and secure chat rooms. The odd e-mail here and there. Three of them have antiquated computers running software six or seven years old, and they haven’t updated their firewalls. Amazing how people give themselves up like that, just like they used to blow their cover on the phone doing drug deals. All their secrets are easy to pry. You just sneak in and grab them.

It doesn’t take long to find out Kim is long gone.

I check the cop records from the last few days and it’s confirmed. A heavy hit on her own house in the downtown Montrose area. That’s the shady side of the inner city, where a lot of petty crime goes down, and a lot of big crime, too. I used to do major deals with heavy players there. This is major, too. Ten shooters found dead at the scene and five of Kim’s boy toys. There are even a few pictures. Awful stuff. Heads blown to pieces by hollow-point rounds. Buckshot retirement packages, signed in deep red. It all went down the same night I was holed up with her Zebra Squad at the Sheraton. They made a positive ID on most of the bodies. One of them turns out to be the Puerto Rican boy she had on her arm when we did the deal. They were all being slaughtered while I was counting her money. Goddamn, man.

I remember texting her. Asking her if the area was secure.
Whoever texted me back wasn’t Kim Hammer. It was Jenison’s people, keeping me in their crosshairs for the kill. I was dead game and I didn’t even know it.

The funny thing is that there’s no body on record with the cops or the Houston coroners—no positive ID that matches up with Kim. She’s MIA. Maybe made it out alive, maybe not. If she did survive, she’s not surfacing anytime soon. Probably halfway to Havana now on a private jet or a charter flight. All smart gangsters have a getaway plan and backup cash stashed somewhere. I hope she made it.

I dial some numbers through Skype scramblers, talk to a few people directly, using fake names I dig up. None of them tell me anything—not even the things I already know. Ghosts are roaming the streets, and everyone’s scared.

It’s the city of the living dead, man.

I check in with my hackers, the guys I hired last night from the hotel. There are six e-mails with detailed information, links to high-security databases, passwords and encryption code. And the numbers of bank accounts I’m supposed to wire their money to. Most of what I dig up is background on Jayne Jenison, nothing that helps me now.

I need to know about Cheyenne Mountain. Need to know what could possibly be more final than death-from-above by dirty bombs. Something way off the grid. Yet still controlled by Strategic Air Command, Region Eleven.

Maybe Jenison was lying. Maybe it really
is
about nukes.

But she had no reason to lie.

I was dead game.

Don’t look in the face of God, kid.

You don’t have what it takes.

. . . Wait a minute, what’s this?

A message just popped up from a guy who says he has something he won’t share in an e-mail. Has to be more private. I don’t
know his name, not his real name, but he’s heavy in government contracting. His street cred is solid and he has really good references from a man I used to rob banks with. He’s attached an article to his message about something called Angel Point—a government project I read about while I was in prison. The Point wasn’t a mountain, but really an underground city they were building in Nevada. It made the news in ’08. Some sort of government-sponsored land development scheme, a little like the exurb projects, way out in the desert.

Exurbs. Ready-made cities, created by rich people, for rich people, built outside society. Maybe a model for a new world order.

Angel Point was sort of the same thing, only underground.

Subterranean neighborhoods that look like shopping malls.

I get in the secure chat room and type in my guy’s code, ask him what’s up? He’s not there. Damn. I keep the room open while I start making moves on the number I memorized in the bar. It was still in my phone when I woke up almost dead this morning.

I hack my own encrypted database offsite—the cloud where I keep all my special rainy-day blackjack programs—and I pull out some tricky software that allows me to trace the number from the same global positioning satellite this computer is wired up to. It’s traced back to an iPhone that’s been used a few times in the past twenty-four hours. I get GPS information on every position a call was made from or received at. My two calls to the iPhone were taken in a location just outside the hotel I was in. Then the trail arcs across Houston, ends in the center of a neighborhood with a lot of sleazy business going on. Places I used to know about but never went anywhere near.

There’s one address in particular—the iPhone hasn’t moved from that spot in eight hours. She ran there and stopped.

I don’t recognize the address, but I get a nice picture from orbit.

A big industrial building with razor-wire fences—looks like a manufacturing plant from the outside. I know better. My best guess is they mass-produce drugs there, among other things. Could be Hartman’s place. It could be his revolving inventory. His human-trafficking hub. Whoever I was talking to last night, she left her number at the bar, waited outside for the call—then ran like hell, maybe got herself snatched.

Baby, get the hell out of there. They’re going to kill you.

That’s all she said to me.

Was that all she had time to say?

Was it you, Toni?

Maybe she’d escaped from Hartman and tried to warn me. Or staked out that hotel lobby for days on a hot tip I would be in the building, then got in too deep when the goons descended on the place.

Yeah. It’s starting to make sense.

I print a hard copy of the satellite picture. That’s the objective now. Get in that building. Offer Franklin’s men whatever it takes.

Get in there and find her.

•  •  •

I
’m about to call it a day when my secure IM pings.

It’s my ghost in the chat room, the guy who sent me the information on Angel Point.

He pops in under the screen name SAVIOR-1. Subtle.

We talk in really elaborate code. He’s that afraid of what he has to tell me. I have to use a decrypt program to understand anything he types to me, and even then it’s all in broken English, like some foreign guy using one of those over-the-counter Babylon translation programs to talk to you from a coffee shop in Rome.

He tells me the article on Angel Point was just background. Asks me if I’ve ever heard of the exurbs.

Yes, of course I have.

He says this is bigger than all of that. A massive project with a base of operations built on American soil.

I ask him how he knows about it.

He says there’s no way in hell he’s telling me who he is or anything else he knows in a chat room. He wants to meet me in person. He names a nice public place in the center of Houston. He’ll have to fly in from somewhere to meet me.

I tell him he can drop dead. No way am I exposing myself like that.

He says it’s really important. He’s afraid for his life. Two of his friends are missing—guys who went looking for answers. He says there’s a clock ticking. Says there’s not much time. The sky is falling.

David Hartman said that to me.

Said those exact words:

We’ve covered all the bases and the sky is falling.

I ask him what any of this has to do with Cheyenne Mountain or the code I hacked. I ask him what could be worse than nukes.

He doesn’t tell me.

I tell him to drop dead again.

No, he says.
Wait.

Money time. He names a figure I can’t afford, and I tell him so. I tell him he can take or leave my original offer. I have other things to do and I have to use my cash to do them. None of this matters.

He calls me a fool, tells me I have no clue what I’m in the middle of, what I’ve involved him in. He has a family and they could all be killed because of this.

I tell him tough shit, man. Those are the rules. You go in deep and sometimes you get hurt. I’ll honor my original deal with him, not one penny more. Ten grand dropped off in his name at a night deposit box. It’s the best I can do.

I’m thinking about that big industrial building.

I’m picturing my wife there.

I’m seeing David Hartman with his filthy, greasy hands all over her. I have to save her. Cheyenne Mountain be damned.

So drop dead, hacker. This is bullshit.

SAVIOR-1 doesn’t answer for ten minutes.

Then, the IM pops up with two words.

That’s all I get.

Just two words for ten grand.

They’re worth every goddamn penny.

Resurrection Express.

12

00000-12

GARBAGE MEN

I
t’s the face of God, son.
Don’t look.

I sit in the basement armory, my fingers moving fast again across the keys of the computer, wondering what the hell I’m doing. I’m checking every available database for information on bomb shelters and defense grids. Big projects built on American soil. Nobody knows jack. At least not anybody who wants to talk. I ask about Jayne Jenison again. Nothing this time. Complete radio silence.

You ain’t got the balls.

God is a mean motherfucker and he hates you.

The silence scares the hell out of me. They all wanted to talk the other night—the money brought them running like starving mice to a moldy cheddar lump—and now everyone’s scared to death. People don’t shut up on secure lines unless the fear of God is in them. I’m starting to think that the less I know about all this crap, the better off I’ll be when the chips come down.

But the nagging voice still haunts me—the Sarge’s voice. His eyes, when he tried to cancel Alex Bennett’s ticket. The ghost of that sick, mean bastard, filling the silent spaces, spiraling off on weird new trajectories in my head, like the voice of some terrible beast that knows all the secrets about everything . . .