Taking Flight (A Devereux Novel) (7 page)

Derek fidgeted with the splint on his finger. It was
uncomfortable, but he couldn’t complain. Considering the state his car had been
in, it was a wonder he’d survived at all.

Once he’d recovered enough
to think properly, he had ducked out of the car and gotten away into the night
as much as he’d been able, in case the faceless driver came back to finish the
job. After waiting in darkness and silence for as long as he could stand it, he
had called for help. It wasn’t the first time he had
totaled
a car among those rocks, but this time was different. There was someone out
there who was after him, and like Evan said, he wanted it to look like it was
an accident.

He hadn’t mentioned the
other driver to the police. It didn’t feel right. He didn’t know who to
trust—he might not have anything to fear from the cops but he couldn’t
trust anyone outside of his brothers. Even Sara, the bright patch of sunlight
that had drifted into his life, was suspect.

Derek had her investigated,
and she had been telling the truth about everything. He read all her articles
and the depth and care she put into her research was clear, the passion pouring
forth from the pages as though she was there reading it to him in the animated
way she had when she enjoyed a topic.

The sun shone down on him
where he waited on the park bench. They’d agreed to meet here where it was airy
and light.

She came into sight around
the side of the observatory, the sun catching her hair and lighting it like
spun gold.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen her during the day.

She was a revelation,
adorned in a short blue sundress that matched her eyes perfectly.

“It’s so nice up here!” she
said as she neared him. Her cheeks carried a slight hint of red that seemed to
be a constant feature.

He nodded. “It really is. I
love it up here. The views of the city are unmatched, and the park itself is
just gorgeous.”

“We’ll have to come back at
night next time.”

“Shall we?” Derek held out
his hand, delighted when she took it. They strolled along the dirt path toward
the popular vantage point.

“What happened to your
hand?” she asked, pointing out the splint strapped to the
pinky
and ring fingers of his left hand. “You didn’t have that a couple nights ago at
your party, did you?”

“Oh, this?” He held it up
and shrugged. “It was stupid.”

“What? Is it too
embarrassing?” She smiled. “You can tell me, honest! I won’t make fun of
you—too much!”

All right, let’s see if there’s any sign she knows more than she’s
letting on.

“Well, I was driving back
from the airport last night, and I crashed my car.
Totaled
it.” He said it in a matter-of-fact way, but it was tough to keep the raw
emotion of the chase and the crash off his face. It was still so new, so
recent, that he shouldn’t have even been out of the house again. He watched her
face as she took in his words.

Fear when he mentioned the
airport, concern when he said he crashed. And shock when he said he
totaled
it.

“Oh my God, Derek! This
happened last night? Are you all right?” She caught herself. “I mean, you’re
obviously okay, but how are you feeling? What happened? Is your finger the only
thing you hurt?”

Her response was how he
would have expected someone hearing about it for the first time to react. She
didn’t wait to see if he would mention another component to the crash. Derek
let himself relax a little, lowering his guard.

“I’m fine. A fractured left
pinky
is all I got out of it—a shame. I wouldn’t have
minded more daring battle wounds.” It was a mindset that drove people nuts.
Sara wasn’t an exception.

“Battle wounds? That’s
crazy. Why would you
want
to be
injured? That makes no sense.” She examined him as though maybe he had suffered
head damage.

It wasn’t easy to explain.
“It’s like a badge of
honor
. I ran the bleeding edge
of performance, and it scored a hit on me. This one just wasn’t too major.”
Sara continued to look mystified. “I guess I should explain. I was racing along
this series of intense back roads in the
Lambo
. I
always do this, and I try to go just a bit faster every time, cut the corners a
little sharper, push myself to the edge just a little more. It’s satisfying, I
guess, to know I can conquer the road in a way no one else can.”

Sara shrugged. “If you say
so. I guess I can empathize. It’s like when I sink my teeth into a massive
story and keep unraveling more and more threads. I won’t stop until I’ve
discovered the whole thing and untangled the web of lies people weave to
protect themselves.” She shot him an unreadable look. “Sometimes, the
information comes with a price.”

What is that supposed to mean?
Once more he got the feeling he didn’t know
everything he should about this woman. She was deeper than the ones he usually
dealt with, and he might get lost in that depth.

“Anyway, that was my night.
How was yours?” He wanted to get off the topic of the crash. There were still
too many questions he couldn’t answer.

“Oh, you know, nothing too
special. My roommate and I went out to—oh, holy crap.”

They had come out onto the
place where the ground dropped away beside the path, and the whole of the city
spread forth in front of them. It was magnificent, but nowhere near as amazing
as the view from his plane.

Derek stepped closer to the
edge, but Sara’s hand squeezed his and held him back. She hadn’t budged, still
staring out at the view.

“It’s magnificent, isn’t
it?” He hadn’t grown up in Los Angeles, but Derek was proud of his for-now
adoptive city, and more than just for the lifestyle.

“Magnificent? It’s terrifying!”

That wasn’t awe in her
voice, he realized. It was terror. Pure terror.

“Sara? Are you okay?”

She edged backward, taking
him with her. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the sight as though she was afraid
if she looked away the cliff would come after her. He stepped in front of her,
blocking her view.

“Hey, Sara?” He stepped
closer, and her eyes tracked up from his chest to look into his face. “Are you
okay? Is everything all right?”

As though a switch flicked
in her brain, she shook herself a little and shuddered. “Oh, Derek. I’m sorry,
I can’t… it’s too much. I thought I’d be able to do this, but it can’t happen.”

“Are you afraid of heights,
Sara?” It seemed odd that a confident, engaged woman like herself could suffer
from such a crippling phobia. To say afraid seemed like an understatement
compared to her reaction.

Her jaw trembled as she
tried to find the words to speak. “Ever since Michael died… I haven’t been able
to stand heights. Even one story off the ground is getting too much, although I
can stomach it. The thought of flying…” She barked a short, harsh laugh. “You
know I made my roommate drive with me to Los Angeles from Chicago? I had
nightmares at the thought of boarding a plane. If I had to take a plane here I
would have just quit my job on the spot instead of coming, and I
love
what I do.”

Things came together more
clearly for Derek. “Michael is the fiancé you lost a couple years ago, right?
Did he die in a plane crash? I’m sorry if that’s too direct. We don’t have to
talk about this, if you don’t want to.”

She looked almost physically
uncomfortable. “No—no, it’s okay. It will help to say it. I’ve been
avoiding it for so long now, and it’s just been festering at the back of my
mind. Yes, Michael was my fiancé, and…” She struggled to speak for a moment. “…
he
died in a plane crash two years ago. It was on the way to
Los Angeles.”

Wow, double whammy. No wonder she didn’t want to fly here. I guess it’s
a good thing I didn’t bring her to the airport like I’d planned. I doubt that
would have gone well.

“I’m so sorry. Is there
anything I can do for you?”

Sara looked overwhelmed,
lost. He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, but he didn’t think
that was what she needed at the moment. His suspicions were borne out with her
next words.

“I just… I need space. I
need to go. Promise you won’t hate me for bringing you all the way out here for
nothing?”

She didn’t wait for a reply
before she bolted back up the trail. Derek stood there, watching that glorious
blonde hair bounce away. He looked around, noticing a couple photographers
sneaking photos of him, his girl having left him alone.

Well, that doesn’t happen too often. I bet the tabloids will get a kick
out of this one.

It took a long drive on solid ground, an hour of
yoga, a cup of powerful coffee, and time spent trying to think about nothing
before Sara could settle the nervous roiling of her stomach. By the time it
stopped roaring she was kicking herself.

“Damn it, Sara. You had
Derek Devereux there, on a nice walk, receptive to questions. You were on what
can only be termed a date with an extraordinary man, and it would have been
natural to try to learn more about him. And what do you do? I’ll tell you what
you did. You turned into a shivering, emotional wreck over the death of your
fiancé and blew everything, that’s what!”

Despite how terribly she had
handled everything, she hated that Michael represented an obstacle to her
moving forward with her life.
Something to avoid thinking
about, or to get over.
It wasn’t fair to him, to his memory. But it was
that kind of thinking preventing her from carrying on.

She tried to force herself
to calm down, but it didn’t work. The coffee was a poor choice—it gave
her limbs a nervous energy that made her want to bounce around the walls. Becky
had left the apartment, out to look at the current fashions and try to network
and sell her designs somewhere influential.

Trying to put the disaster
of an afternoon out of her mind, Sara pulled out her list of contacts and
flipped
through,
trying to find anyone she hadn’t
called yet and might deliver useful information. It looked bleak. Her list,
once a shining resource for any need, had been poorly maintained over the past
two years and fallen into disrepair. A few of her best informants within
government agencies had changed positions and their old contact information was
obsolete. They weren’t people easy to track down.

While she tried to figure
out a path forward, an email popped into her inbox with a distinctive chime. It
contained no name or subject line and the address was spoofed to an uninspired
[email protected]

I heard you were asking for
highly classified information. We used to have a good working relationship, and
while I can’t tell you much, I will say the Onyx Company is exactly what you
are looking for. Try searching for government military contracts with the
codename Blackbird. Anywhere that Blackbird is listed as the
supplier,
Onyx or one of its child companies is involved.

That was it. It was huge. It
changed everything—if it held up.

Responding to the email
would yield no response. There were only a few people who could have heard
about her inquiries and placed highly enough to help her out, but it was still
a bad sign they could find out about her search.

Her heart beat a little
faster. This email was unlike anything she had ever seen before. That someone
had found out about her search and contacted her over it meant that others who
weren’t looking out for her best interests
may
also
have found out about her digging around in Derek Devereux’s history. Michael’s
grim warning about staying out of the military’s path resonated with her. She
might have found herself on a different playing field, one where she didn’t
know the rules, or even the players.

Still, the mystique of it
all enraptured the journalist in her. She had to know what was going on.

On an earlier assignment
Sara had gained access to a heavily redacted government database, and thanks to
a high-ranking contact, she could access the unedited versions of many of the
contracts contained within. It was likely the same official who had sent her
the clue about Blackbird.

She pulled up the query
she’d originally run and replaced the word Onyx with Blackbird.

Instantly,
hundreds of results popped up, then thousands.

Holy crap.

She dug through the list.
Some were useless—complete nonsense—but others were more telling,
just as the email mentioned. On almost every one, Blackbird was listed as the
supplier, and the contracts looked to be heavily weapons-oriented. They ranged
dramatically in cost, from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of
dollars.

Even with her special
access,
vast quantities of information was
blacked
out, something she had never seen before when dealing with the database and the
code she possessed.

“This is… insane,” Sara
muttered. “Hundreds of millions of dollars. All
funneled
into this one company. And it’s owned by Derek and his brothers?”

It got even odder. When Sara
looked to see which budget the money came from, there was no indication. She
tried dozens of contracts, and they were all the same—millions of dollars
coming from nowhere and flowing into Blackbird.

She sat back in her chair.
It was as though a door had opened into an alternate universe, one she hadn’t
known existed. And it sickened her.

“Derek must know about this.
What services could Onyx render that’s worth that kind of money?” The work she
had done on the starving poor of America had shown it wouldn’t take that much
to feed and clothe them all—it was embarrassing it was still a problem in
a country as rich and wealthy as America. With the kinds of profits Onyx
churned out, the Devereux clan could single-handedly wipe out poverty in the
country.

It shook her to the core.
She had thought Derek was a good man, but what did she know about him? Was he
as good an actor as those he liked to surround himself with? She hadn’t been
able to get him to divulge much information about himself, and there was no
telling whether anything she had gotten was truthful or accurate.

And here I’ve been, blurting out everything I am and my entire life
story to him at every available opportunity.
He must have thought she was pathetic. The
only secret she hadn’t spilled was that she wasn’t here because of a story on
the homeless, but instead targeted him. Maybe he already knew, and that’s why
he singled her out at the air race gala and had been wooing her ever since.

It was a remarkable twist,
if true. And she could all too easily picture it being the truth. For a man of
his resources and connections, how hard would it be to discover she’d asked
after him and his company? At least one of her old contacts had already
discovered that information.

A crash at the front door
startled her, and she almost jumped across the room. It was a big, echoing
boom, and Sara waited, poised, all of her fight-or-flight instincts raised.

She waited, and waited,
until she decided it must have been something falling over in the hall. Maybe a
small earthquake she hadn’t noticed through her absorption but shook the
building enough to dislodge an object.

There wasn’t anything out of
place in the front foyer of the
apartment which
wasn’t
surprising. The sound felt like it had carried through the door.

She peered out the peephole,
but saw nothing other than the plain, drab hallway. She had made sure they didn’t
take an apartment higher than the second floor although the ground level would
have been better. Becky hadn’t wanted their windows to be at street level and
she had a point, but Sara’s fear of heights was a bigger priority.

With a cautious slowness, Sara
pulled open the front door. It swung into the room, and she had to step to the
side to avoid getting hit by a large dagger that punctured the metal of the
door and hung there.

“What the hell?” She reached
up to it and touched it. It didn’t budge—it had penetrated solidly.

It was a modern knife with a
precision blade and rubberized hilt. Sara knew nothing about weapons, but it
had a partially serrated edge and looked like it could do serious damage. It
would have taken a lot of strength to drive it through the metal of the door
like that—she wasn’t even able to budge it.

There was a piece of paper
pinned to the door underneath the note. It was blank except for two words
written in large, bold letters.

Go Home.

“Oh my God!” It was a
threat.
A tangible, visible, physical threat.
Startled, Sara looked down the hallway but saw no one. She slammed the door
shut and locked it. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Her breath came in great
gasps. “What do I do?” Her mind raced. Should she try to climb down the
balcony, escape?

No, that’s nonsense. It’s more dangerous out there than in here.
Whoever left the note is still out there.

She had received threats
related to her work before, but it had been several years and she was in a much
more fragile mental state than she had been back when she’d had Michael and an
editor she trusted to back her up against anything. Those had been mostly empty
threats, made by desperate people. This was a damn
knife
, thrust into her
front
door
.

One thing was for sure: she
would have to take it down, or else Becky would lose her shit. She might shrug
off a hole in one side of the door, but an actual knife sticking out of it was
a whole other story.

The big question is, who left it there?

She grabbed her phone and
sent a message to Derek. She needed to figure out if he was behind this. If so,
then she would just go home. Her job and this mystery weren’t worth her life.