Red Knight Falling (13 page)

I didn’t know if I could save the day. I didn’t even know if I could save my team. But I was sure as hell going to give it my best shot.

TWENTY-TWO

I found Cody outside, leaning up against the motel wall with his arms folded, watching the sun rise over the backstreets of Orlando. The sky glowed with a gritty blue haze.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

I felt myself hesitating. Locking down. I took a deep breath and shoved it all aside.

“I need to talk to you,” I told him.

“About?”

I strode up and looked him in the eye.

“I like you,” I said.

He blinked. “I . . . like you, too.”

“I don’t know if you do, Cody. Because you don’t know me. And I’ve been afraid. I’ve been afraid that once you do, once you really know me, you’ll run away.” I fidgeted with my hands. “I’m afraid that you probably
should
run away, because frankly I’m a goddamn mess, and being anywhere near me isn’t good for your sanity or your life expectancy.”

“Hey,” he said, “let me be the judge of that, okay? Maybe if we spent some time together—I mean,
normal
time, doing normal things.”

I laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. I shook my head.

“Cody, do you know what I do when I’m not on duty? I wait. I go through the motions, and I wait for the phone to ring. I wait to be called back to active service, back to the mission, because this is
who I am
. The only place I feel useful, the only place I feel
alive
, is in the field.”

“Harmony, I—”

“You deserve the truth,” I said. “You asked if I knew Abrams’s gun was empty, but that’s not the question you really want answered. The question is, would I have let you die to protect Vigilant Lock’s secrets?”

I took a deep breath.

“Yes. I would have. Without hesitation. And I would have sacrificed my own life the exact same way. Because if I gave Abrams the intel he wanted, it would have put dozens, maybe hundreds, of people’s lives at risk. One life, to save a hundred? It’s not even a question. And if that gun had been loaded, I would have
hated
myself for not saving you. And I would have mourned you. But I would not, for one second, have doubted that I made the right call.”

He blinked. Started to speak, but his voice caught. He took a breath and tried again.

“Why,” he said, almost whispering, “are you telling me this?”

“I’m not saying these things to push you away. I’m saying them because you deserve absolute honesty from me. And if you want to be in my life—and God knows I won’t blame you if you walk away, like everyone else I’ve ever tried to have a relationship with—you need to understand that this”—I waved a hand, taking in the motel, Orlando, the world—“comes with it. This is who I am.”

He didn’t answer right away. He turned his face and watched the road. An eighteen-wheeler lumbered past, trailing gray smoke from soot-flecked chrome as it rumbled over a jagged pothole.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay? What does ‘okay’ mean?”

Cody shook his head and smiled.

“It means okay. So you’re a secret-agent witch who hunts monsters. Maybe normal is a little too much to expect.” He looked me up and down as he pushed himself away from the wall, smooth and easy. “Or maybe normal’s just overrated. This is . . . a lot to process. So I’ll process it.”

“So are we . . .” I shrugged. “What are we doing here, Cody?”

“Hell, Harmony, I don’t know.”

He took my waist in his hands, pulling me closer. Almost leaning in for a kiss, but holding back.

“But I’m not running,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“So,” he asked, “what now?”

I looked to Jessie’s door.

“Now, I get this team back on track. We’ve got a lead to follow, and time’s running out.”

I knocked on Jessie’s door. Then, when she didn’t answer, I started pounding. Eventually I heard the dead bolt click. If she’d slept, it didn’t show: she cracked the door, peering out through three inches of darkness, her eyes bloodshot and hair a mess.

She didn’t say anything. Just stared at me, face leaden, like I was a salesman on her doorstep.

“I found a lead,” I said. “Something we missed. Something
big
.”

She gave me a lethargic shrug. “Fine. Get everybody together. Let me know what you find out.”

“You’re the team leader. That’s
your
job.”

“And you’re better at it. So I’m deputizing you. Pretty clear I’ve got no damn business being out from behind a desk anyway.”

She’s giving up,
I thought. She wore her bleak apathy like a corpse’s shroud. It wasn’t depression; it was more like she didn’t even have the energy to be sad. For someone like Jessie, who savored emotional extremes like gourmet cuisine, it was hard to watch her drown in—

That was the key. Emotion. I turned and walked away, back to my own room. A short soap-spotted glass sat next to the bathroom sink.

“What are you doing?” Cody asked, standing at my shoulder.

“Something . . . really, really dangerous,” I said, “so keep your distance.”

I filled the glass with cold water and marched back to Jessie’s door.

Once she finally opened it up again, after another minute of pounding, I didn’t say a word. I just flung the water in her face. She sputtered, suddenly wide-eyed and animated, kick-started to life.

“What the
fuck
, Harmony—”

“Agent Temple,” I said, “this team is your responsibility. So take a shower, get dressed, and report for duty. This isn’t a request.”

“And I said,
you
do it. You’re the one with all the answers. Nobody needs me around, ruining everything.”

I dropped the glass, letting it shatter on the sidewalk as I lunged at her. I grabbed her by the front of her nightshirt and shoved her backward into the dark motel room.

“Harmony,
stop
—”

“
No.
Do I have to turn on the water and throw you in the damn shower myself? Fine. Let’s go.”

She grappled with me, trying to get her hands around my neck, snarling as her turquoise eyes shimmered in the gloom. I twisted her around, getting her in an arm bar, forcing her toward the bathroom door. Her strength grew, slowly but steadily, as she squirmed out of my grip.

“What do you
want
from me?” she hissed.

“You. We need
you
.”

She got loose, spun around, and drove her fist into my gut. It felt like a sledgehammer, knocking the wind out of me, but I didn’t let up. I threw myself onto her, sweeping one of her legs with my heel, and we tumbled to the cheap carpet. I pinned her under me while she squirmed and spat like a feral cat.

“
Nobody needs me!
I
failed
our last two missions, I failed
Kevin
—”

She twisted around, kicking, and I slapped her across the face.

“So get
mad
about it, goddamn it!” I shouted at her. “So they beat us! It happens. Some days we lose. Some days we lose big. Are you going to mope around and let them get the last laugh, or are we going to gear up, get out there, and kick some asses?”

She froze, every muscle in her body taut and trembling. Her eyes blazed in the shadows like brands of blue fire.

“What happened to Kevin,” she said, her voice soft, “what I
let
happen to him, can’t be fixed. I was so smug. I thought I had everything under control, thought I knew everything, while Mikki was . . . I
let
her use him, Harmony. I let her break him.”

“Jessie,” I whispered, “he’s not broken. He’s just hurt. And hurts can heal. They heal faster when you’ve got friends to lean on. Strong friends. Like you. So right now, you need to be strong. For him.”

I rolled off her. I sat up, my back against the foot of her bed, and offered her my hand. The glow in her eyes faded as she took hold and squeezed. I pulled her up and we sat side by side.

“Do you remember,” I said, “that car ride to Detroit after we met Douglas Bredford? I was . . . I was pretty upset about the things he told us.”

“Sure.” She nodded.

“We barely knew each other, but you still knew exactly what to say to turn me around. You didn’t just make me laugh, or make me feel better—you made me feel confident again. You shared your strength with me. That’s one of your talents. That’s something you can do that none of us can. And right now we need that. We need you.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

“For the record,” she said, “you
ever
slap me again, we’d better be having rough sex at the time or you are in
serious
trouble.”

“I think I’d be in serious trouble either way.”

“This is true,” she said, groaning as she pushed herself up. She took my hand and hauled me to my feet.

Cody wasn’t alone in the motel room doorway. April watched from the threshold. “I heard the shouting,” she said.

“Just my morning wake-up call,” Jessie said, stretching her arms behind her back as she strode to the door. “C’mon, I need to talk to Kevin.”

As we passed her by, April nodded my way. Her left hand, leaning on her chair’s armrest, curled to give me a subtle thumbs-up.

We heard the bed frame squeak behind Kevin’s door, and his slow trudge to answer Jessie’s knock. He stood slump-shouldered in the doorway, in his T-shirt and boxers, rubbing his eyes.

“I need to talk to you,” Jessie said.

He gave a noncommittal shrug and walked back inside. He sat down on the edge of the unmade bed.

“I know,” he said. “I’m fired, I get it.”

She sat down beside him. I stood near the door, watching, silent.

“Fired? Why would you think that?” she asked him.

“Because I totally blew it? What happened in Boston was bad enough, but I led them right to us. And we lost the tablet, and now who knows
what’s
gonna happen when that thing in space comes back. That’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

“No,” Jessie said, “it’s mine. Because I was supposed to be protecting you, and I let you down.”

“I didn’t
need
you to protect me from Mikki. I can make my own choices. I just . . . made bad ones.”

Jessie rested her palms on her knees.

“Sometimes letting people make bad choices and learn from the consequences is a leader’s job,” Jessie told him. “But not in a situation like this. I exposed you to danger, and I didn’t work hard enough to keep you safe.”

He started to respond, and she held up a finger to silence him.

“I’m not done. Kevin, I’m sorry. I can’t change what happened, but I promise you, I’ll do better. I’ll earn your trust again.”

He shook his head. “You never lost it. But you don’t need me, Jessie. Roman was right. I’m a total screwup, and I’m not good at anything. The team’s better off without me.”

I took a step closer.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I found a clue. Something we missed. And you’re the
only
person on this team who can connect the dots.”

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. And besides: Don’t you want to be there when we kick Roman Steranko’s door in?”

A slow smile rose to his lips.

“Yeah,” he said, “I really would.”

Jessie put an arm around Kevin’s shoulder, pulling him into a hug.

Behind me, April cleared her throat. “So this lead. What exactly did you find?”

“The reason our enemies have been a step ahead of us since Oregon,” I said. “We were sabotaged by a mole. A double agent, buried deep inside Vigilant Lock. And I know who it is.”

TWENTY-THREE

Cody spotted a diner down the street from the Crossroads Motel, a no-name greasy spoon with orange vinyl booths and sparkling Formica tables that looked like the skin of a bowling ball. The five of us squeezed into a semicircle booth in the back. The aromas of strong black coffee and fresh-cooked bacon had my mouth watering the second we walked in the door; that’s exactly what I ordered for breakfast, along with a half stack of pancakes slathered with whipped butter and hot maple syrup.

Screw the calories,
I thought,
I earned this.

“Okay, so we know Dr. Huerta was compromised,” I said. “His assassin killed him and took his place, with the intent of stealing the curse tablet. The coroner placed the time of death about an hour after our briefing on the plane.”

“The Red Knight is a hot commodity,” Jessie said. “Seems like everybody wants to get their hands on it.”

“Ah, but that’s exactly it. Huerta’s double wasn’t looking for a satellite. Remember what he said? He kept demanding we hand over the
tablet
. The tablet that was wrapped up inside a plastic bag at the time: he couldn’t have seen it.”

“And the only way he would know about the satellite’s contents,” April said, “is if he’d listened in on our communications. We’ve been tapped.”

Jessie slumped back against the orange vinyl. “Jesus. Our communications are completely compromised. We’re exposed.
How?
”

“Wait,” Kevin said. “That doesn’t work. What about the briefing on the plane? Linder’s instructions came in on a USB stick. There wasn’t any comms traffic to tap into—the laptop wasn’t even connected to the Internet. That’s the only place we ever heard Huerta’s name mentioned, or any of the details about the meeting.”

“That’s what kept me awake,” I said. “How is the opposition keeping us under constant watch? Everything from our phone calls to the briefing on the jet—off-line or not—have been under surveillance this entire time.”

Cody rubbed his chin. “Sounds like a puzzle, or maybe a magic trick. So how’s it done?”

“Kevin is right,” I said. “Even if somebody put a tap on our phones, that wouldn’t have given them the details of our briefing. So it had to be something else, something external. I kept asking myself, what changed in Oregon?”

“Beyond making contact with Agent Lawrence?” April said.

“Exactly.”

I reached into my pocket. Then I set the pair of camera glasses down on the Formica-topped table between us.

“Our gear,” Jessie said.

Then I shared what I’d discovered just before sunrise. Carefully unscrewing the left glasses arm, pulling down a hinge on the chunky Buddy Holly lenses, and showing everyone the tiny, empty hollow inside.

“There was a bug planted in the glasses,” I said, “which I’ve left back at the motel room, for obvious reasons.
Lawrence set us up.
He gave us a piece of useful investigative equipment, something he
knew
we’d carry at all times, and wired it for sound. Every word we’ve said since Oregon—including the audio from the briefing on the plane—has gone straight to whoever he was working for.”

Jessie’s hand clenched around her glass of orange juice, knuckles turning white.

“Son of a
bitch
,” she snapped. “Lawrence was a double agent. Hell, his entire
cell
could be dirty. Who knows how much intel they’ve given up? We need to plug this leak, pronto.”

“Isn’t it plugged already?” Cody said. “I mean, Harmony found the bug. They can’t listen in on us anymore.”

April sipped her water and delicately patted her lips with a paper napkin. “Whoever Lawrence’s handler was, they are in possession of a considerable amount of confidential information, which could prove quite damaging if released.
That
is the leak that requires . . . plugging.”

“Oh,” he said.

“That doesn’t help us right now, though,” Jessie said. “Getting the curse tablet back is our number one priority, and whoever Lawrence and Huerta’s copycat were working for, we know they’re the
one
faction in this mess who can’t possibly have it.”

“But they might know who does,” I said. “Turning a Vigilant Lock agent into a double, arranging Dr. Huerta’s assassination and getting an impostor into place with a Hollywood-grade makeup job in the span of a few hours . . . that takes resources. Serious resources. For all we know, they’ve got eyes on everyone involved, not just us.”

“So how do we find them?” Kevin asked.

“I’ve got a hunch. Cody, did you bring your laptop?”

Cody held it up, then passed it over to Kevin.

“Here,” he said, “I think I’m gonna let the expert handle this.”

We pushed our plates back, clearing room for Kevin to work. I chewed a bite of bacon while he fired up the screen.

“Okay,” I said, “pull up that video from Lawrence’s wristwatch. We know he started recording when he heard Roman’s men breaking into the cabin. I’m interested in what he was doing right
before
that.”

The video rolled. The quick blur at the beginning, the sound of breaking glass, the door buckling as the gunman kicked it in—

“Back it up,” I said. “Did you hear that, right when the camera turns on? Almost like a voice, but too faint to make out. Go to the beginning, and advance it one frame at a time.”

Two clicks and the blur at the beginning, as the camera flashed past Lawrence’s opposite hand, was just clear enough to make out.

“It’s his cell phone,” Kevin said. “That’s the voice at the beginning—he was on a call.”

“Bet my next paycheck he was talking to his handler,” I said. A folded slip of paper nestled in my slim wallet: the scrap Lawrence had given me back at the lodge, with his cell number. I slid it across the table.

Kevin cracked his knuckles, looking confident for the first time since we left Boston.

“I’ll bet
my
next paycheck,” he said, “that by the time you finish those pancakes, I’ll have his last fifty phone calls
and
his bank statements.”

Jessie reached over and rubbed his shoulder. “Go get ’em, tiger. Crack this guy’s moldy corpse open and see what kind of roaches come skittering out.”

April paused with a forkful of scrambled egg midway to her mouth, eyed it, then set it back down on her plate.

Lawrence was careful. His checking account looked just like mine: a biweekly salary from the FBI and a small added bonus, once a month, from the Department of Health and Human Services. That was our Vigilant Lock stipend, funneled through an HHS pork-barrel program. One of Vigilant’s head honchos had a seat on the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions: like clockwork, he made sure the program got funded every year so all of Linder’s operatives could get their hazard pay on time.

Well, mostly on time. It wasn’t like any of us got into this line of work with the hopes of getting rich, anyway.

“No red flags,” Jessie mused. “If he was getting paid off, he stashed it in a different account.”

“Why wouldn’t he be getting paid?” Cody asked.

“He may have turned double agent out of a sense of ideology,” April said, “or he might have been blackmailed into it. Once we identify his master, we’ll identify his motive.”

The breakfast plates had all been cleared away, the half stack of pancakes sitting heavy in my stomach. Normally I would have been sleepy after that, but the excitement of the hunt kept me wide-awake—that, and the second round of coffee we’d ordered, paying rent on our table.

Kevin jotted notes on a paper napkin, strings of numbers amid splotches of runny black ink, as he typed with his other hand. “All right, most of his phone log is easy to parse. Half of these calls went to Vigilant Lock numbers: Linder’s encrypted line, a couple of safe houses, nothing fishy. He made a lot of calls to this number in Topeka, at least twice a week, but going by the reverse directory . . . looks like it’s his mom.”

As much as I wanted to be angry at Lawrence for setting us up, the way he went out—kidnapped by Roman and Mikki, tortured and barbecued with a car battery—was more punishment than he deserved. At least his mother would never hear the gory details. He’d be memorialized on the FBI’s Wall of Honor as an agent martyred in the field, with a Linder-approved story of a gun battle with mundane criminals.

I wondered if Linder concocted those cover-ups on the fly, or if my and Jessie’s obituaries had already been written.

“Here’s the standout,” Kevin said. “When he was attacked, Lawrence was on the phone with MacReady Auto Body, a garage in downtown Chicago. That’s not a Vigilant asset.”

Jessie leaned in, reading the screen over his shoulder. “Not a
shared
one, at least. Beach Cell has its own armory. Who knows what else they’ve got?”

“According to Linder, though, the rest of his cell is in deep cover,” I said. “No way he’d risk exposing them with an unnecessary phone call.”

“Not the only time, either.” Kevin pointed at the top of his screen. “He called the same number just before he met with us at the lodge, and—if I’m guessing right—immediately after Linder assigned him to our team.”

“Reporting to his handler,” April said. “And receiving the order to betray us.”

Jessie tossed back the last of her coffee. “All right. It’s not the lead we
want
, but it’s the best one we have. Let’s go kick some doors in.”