Red Knight Falling (10 page)

SEVENTEEN

I ran to the back of the truck bed and leaned out. “Cody!”

“Yeah?” he called back, never taking his eyes off his prisoners.

“How fast can a satellite go around the earth?”

“Depends on how high up it is. Farther they are from Earth, the longer it takes.”

“You saw the Red Knight data. Before its orbit decayed, how fast was it going?”

He rubbed his chin, keeping his gun easy in the other hand, trained on the two kneeling mercenaries.

“Pretty damn fast, and remember, the earth is rotating, too. The Knight was in low Earth orbit, so you’re looking at a relative speed of seventeen thousand miles an hour, maybe? It’d slingshot around the planet in about an hour and a half.”

I slumped back against the olive-tarp wall of the truck bed.
“Shit.”

Jessie squinted at me. “What?”

I hovered my hand an inch above the lead tablet. My palm prickled with static.

“This enchantment, it’s designed to leak, basically. To leave a trail behind it, like the way water makes a wake pattern behind a speedboat.”

“With you so far,” she said.

“This is Greco-Roman magic.” I tapped the lead tablet. “Classic sorcery. It’s called a curse tablet. Basically invoking spirits and gods to put a whammy on your target. They were used for all sorts of things: love spells, court cases . . . they bind and control.”

She nodded. “So somebody bound that entity to it. That’s why it kept getting drawn to the satellite.”

“That’s where we were wrong. Look, at that speed, with this wake effect, the tablet basically wrapped the entire planet in its enchantment. Follow me?”

“Right, and?”

I tapped the central symbol on the tablet, a sprawling design that resembled a maze.

“This? Is a banishing sigil.”

Her eyes widened as she caught my meaning.

“The Red Knight wasn’t attracting the entity,” I said. “It was
keeping it away from Earth
. That’s why it was screaming, in that photograph. It was frustrated. It doesn’t want the Knight. It wants
us
.”

“And the only thing keeping it away from the planet just crash-landed.” She eyed the tablet. “We need to get this thing back into orbit. Because the next time it comes back around—”

“Humanity’s front door is unlocked and wide-open. Remember what Linder said at the briefing: it always returns in the autumn, and we’ve got one week,
tops
, before it’s back again. Let’s go.”

As I climbed down from the truck, jogging over to the car, I heard her on the phone. “This is Agent Temple, authorization ninety-three slash ninety-three. I need a secure line to the director,
now
.”

Kevin sat hunched over his laptop. I knocked on the window, and he jumped.

“C’mon,” I said, gesturing at the bullet-riddled hood. “This ride’s not going anywhere. We’re taking their truck.”

He climbed out from the backseat, computer tucked under one arm. “What’s the scoop? Mission complete?”

“Not even close,” I said and ran back over to Cody. The two mercenaries knelt on the roadside, sullen and silent, fingers laced behind their heads.

“Let’s roll,” I said. “Big trouble, I’ll explain on the way.”

He nodded at the prisoners. “What about these two?”

That was a good question.

As a duly sworn special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, my duty was clear: make a formal arrest and bring them in. Which would mean spending time we didn’t have and facing questions we couldn’t answer.

As an operative for Vigilant Lock, my duty was also clear: neutralize enemy assets by any means necessary. That’s a nice, clean way of saying, “Put our last two bullets in the backs of their heads.” In the field, we don’t call that murder. We call it
termination with extreme prejudice
.

Sometimes, in situations like this, I think about my dad. He was a small-town sheriff, and I don’t know if he ever had to draw his gun in the line of duty, but I still try to imagine how he would have handled the problem. I try to find the path that would have made him proud, if he was still around to see me.

“You two,” I said, “on your feet.”

As they rose, I pointed down the road.

“Start walking. That way.”

They moved slowly, looking back over their shoulders as they trudged ahead. I knew why: they were expecting to get shot in the back. When the bullets didn’t come, they moved a little faster, nerves and fear pushing them down the empty highway, until they finally broke into a flat-out run.

Cody blinked at me. “We’re just letting them go?”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “Between the fire at the lodge and the hostages we freed, if the authorities don’t already know something’s seriously wrong out here, they’re about to. Those two have no resources, no vehicle, and they’re wearing counterfeit army uniforms—which the local cops will be looking for, once they hear what happened at the hotel. They’ll get picked up before daybreak.”

Jessie walked over, phone in hand.

“All right,” she told us, “there’s gonna be a charter jet waiting for us at Roberts Field within two hours. One-way flight to Florida, where we’ll rendezvous with a friendly from NASA. Let’s go pick up April and get the hell out of town.”

We sanitized the scene the quick and dirty way: we stripped each unregistered Glock down to parts, scrubbed them for prints, and scattered them in the woods—now that their ballistics could be tied to a shooting, not to mention a burned-down hotel, the guns were a liability. As for the dead Xerxes mercenaries and the flaming debris in the road . . . well, that’d be a mystery for the locals to deal with. The one real liability was the Ford we’d rented using the Oceanic Polymer AmEx, and Kevin told me he was working on that.

“Already done,” he told me as we strode into the terminal at Roberts Field. “As far as Budget is concerned, that car was actually rented by a Mr. John Smith from Goblu, Ohio, using a stolen credit-card number. That guy causes a
lot
of trouble when we’re around.”

April rolled alongside me, eyes narrow, lips pursed. She hadn’t said much since we picked her up, and even less once we shared the news about the lead tablet. The jet wasn’t ready, so we waited in the dimly lit and nearly empty terminal, finding a place to sit where we could keep our eyes on the entrance.

“Penny for your thoughts,” I told her.

“I’m processing.” She frowned. “Our hypothesis is that the Red Knight was acting as a magical shield, protecting Earth from that . . . apparition, yes?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Then one must ask: Where did the entity come from originally, and what was holding it back
before
the Red Knight was launched? And how, in 1954, did anyone know it was coming?”

I shrugged. “Somebody out there has the answers. And we’ll track them down, just as soon as we get this thing back into orbit.”

While we waited, I took out my trophy from the field: Agent Lawrence’s smashed wristwatch. I kept thinking about what he’d said when he brought over our equipment, about his watch being a gadget like the pair of glasses he’d given us. I turned it over in my hands, running my short fingernails over every bump and knob, looking for anything unusual.

I found it on the side. A hair-fine catch that pulled open at a tug, concealing a micro-USB port underneath.

Kevin and Cody were off by the windows, talking in hushed tones. I walked over and hovered, not sure if I should interrupt.

“But they don’t get it. It wasn’t a crush, okay? It was more than that. When Mikki was around, everything was—” Kevin spotted me and froze. “Hey. What’s up?”

I showed him the port on the watch. “Think you can do anything with this?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding as he took the watch. “Yeah, lemme see what it’s hiding. Not a problem.”

Cody patted Kevin’s shoulder and stood. “Go for it. Harmony, you got a second?”

He followed me over to the terminal windows. Our reflections stood side by side in the darkened glass as a jetliner rumbled by outside.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“Will be. I mean, he’s nineteen. Teenagers are really good at bouncing back. But this Mikki, man, she did a number on his head.”

“I got the impression that’s how she gets her kicks,” I replied. “You didn’t hear her, once you and Kevin were out of earshot. She doesn’t give a damn about him.”

“Yeah? Try telling
him
that.”

“Jessie and April already have. He doesn’t need to hear it from me, too.”

Cody nodded. He stuck his thumbs in his belt, pushing his shoulders back.

“Yeah,” he said, “fair. And it’s not like he’s got much of a shot at a normal life to start with. Harmony, the stuff I saw tonight . . . I don’t think it’s healthy for him to be living like this.”

“He’s normally not in the field. Jessie and I do the legwork; he and April handle operations and logistics.”

“I’m not sure it’s healthy for
you
to be living like this.”

“Says the sheriff’s deputy,” I said. “Every time you put on your badge and go to work, you know you might not come home again. That’s the life we chose.”

“Yeah. I deal with drunk drivers, kids playing mailbox baseball, and the occasional trailer-park meth lab. Not 
this
. And as far as Kevin goes, I don’t just mean keeping him out of harm’s way. Does he have
any
friends, outside the Internet? Does he ever do . . . you know . . . normal nineteen-year-old stuff?”

“It’s the job, Cody. You’ve seen what we’re up against. If we don’t do it, nobody else will.”

He hesitated. I glanced sidelong at him. I could tell he wanted to say something. I could tell he didn’t want to say it, too.

“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

He shook his head.

“Harmony, back there, at the lodge. It’s . . . I tried to shrug it off, but I keep coming back to it, and I have to know. When we were tied up and that Abrams guy was swinging his gun around.”

“Yes?”

“When he put . . .” He looked away from me, back to the window. “When he put that gun to my head and said he’d kill me if you didn’t tell him who you work for.”

I knew this conversation was coming, but it didn’t make my mouth any less dry, my throat any less tight.

“Harmony,” he asked softly, “did you know the gun was empty?”

Outside in the dark, a jet winged its way up into the obsidian clouds, away from us. It turned into a shadow, then it vanished.

I could have made his question go away with a lie. It would have been so easy to tell him yes, I knew it was empty, I wouldn’t have let him die. That was all he wanted to hear.

“Let’s go see what Kevin found on that watch,” I told him. “It might be important.”

EIGHTEEN

Cody didn’t say a word. He just followed me back to Kevin, who had the watch cabled up to the laptop, and a video on pause.

“Well, it’s
something
,” he told us, “but I’m not sure it tells us anything we didn’t already know. It looks like Lawrence turned on the watch when they broke into his cabin.”

He clicked the “Play” icon. The jumpy, grainy video lurched into motion. I saw the blur of Lawrence’s other hand flash past the lens as glass shattered off-camera. There was something else, too: something that sounded like a faint voice, quickly silenced.

Lawrence kept the watch trained in front of him as he skirted sideways across the cabin. The camera panned as his front door blasted inward, kicked down by a steel-toed boot. The man on the threshold barely had time to react, lunging into a blind charge, before three sharp retorts from Lawrence’s pistol—two to the chest, one to the head—dropped him like a rock on the cabin floor.

Lawrence spun at the sound of more shattering glass. Someone had been right behind him, a Vaseline blur on the screen at close range, and we heard a rattling thump. Then a plastic crunch and the feed went dead.

“That’s all we got,” Kevin said. “Does it line up with what you found at the cabin?”

It did. The dead man, the broken windows and door, the signs of an ambush: it didn’t tell us anything new about the people who took him. Still, something bothered me about the video.

“At the very beginning,” I said, “can you go frame by frame for the first five seconds or so, and see if anything stands out? And isolate the sounds?”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “It’ll take me a while, but I’ll get to work. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

“Let me help,” Cody said, sitting down beside him. Not looking my way.

I walked over to find April on the other side of the terminal benches. She was writing in a black Moleskine notebook, recording her thoughts in mechanical pencil.

“Proceed,” she said, not looking up from her notes.

“Huh?”

She looked at me, arching an eyebrow behind her gray-framed bifocals.

“Your body language spoke before you did. Also, I saw you walk to the windows with Cody, and I saw the expressions on both of your faces. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce what you wanted to see me about. So, please. Proceed.”

I told her what we said. And what I hadn’t said.

“I don’t know why I did that to him.” I shook my head. “Why didn’t I just tell him what he wanted to hear?”

“Because it would have been a lie.”

“I don’t
like
to lie,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t know
how
. I was just . . . cruel to him. And I don’t think I’m a cruel person. I mean, am I?”

“You brought him into the field by necessity. Since then he’s faced danger and death on more occasions, in a single evening, than the average person has to in their entire lifetime. Part of you recognizes that, and is trying very hard to drive him away for his own protection.”

I looked down at my hands. “I guess.”

“Of course, one has to look at the deeper implications.”

“How do you mean?”

“Be honest. Are you fond of him?”

I shifted in my chair and looked back over my shoulder. There he was, talking to Kevin. I took a good, long look. Given what he’d been through tonight, he held everything together just fine. Rugged, unkempt but unruffled, with a shadow along his jaw.

“Yeah,” I told April. “I think I am.”

“Now, then,” she said, “describe your life in a single word.”

I tilted my head at her. “What is this, some kind of free-association game?”

“It is what it is. Describe your life in a single word.”

I had to think about that. I’ve never been a really complicated person, at least I don’t think I am, but boiling everything down to one word seemed impossible. Then it hit me.

“It’s . . .” I waved a hand taking it all in. “This. The mission. My life is the mission.”

“You believe that someone being a part of your life means they must become immersed in”—she mimicked my wave—“all of this. Anyone sharing your path has to share
all
of it, including the danger, but putting a civilian in danger is something you can’t tolerate. So—consciously or subconsciously—you do what you must to ensure you remain alone.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m better off alone.”

April shook her head. “I didn’t say that. I will say that you need to decide what you want. And, insofar as our friend Cody goes, decide soon.”

Jessie strolled over and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “All right, ramblers, let’s get rambling. Jet’s fueled and ready to go. Oh. Hey, did I just interrupt something heavy? You look like you were having a capital-
D
discussion.”

“It’s fine,” I told her, waving it away. “Let’s get to work.”

“Finally,” Jessie said, “traveling in the style we have earned.”

The charter jet was a Phenom 300—six plush leather seats the color of a stormy sky, wood veneer, sleek and spotless.

April chuckled. “I think it’s more likely Linder hired the first jet that could get here fast enough. He would have put us in the belly of a cargo plane if that would have been more convenient.”

“Don’t ruin this for me,” Jessie said, dropping into one of the seats with a contented sigh. “The style we have
earned
.”

The captain, dressed in a pressed navy dress shirt and a matching cap, paused as he counted heads.

“We were told to expect only four passengers,” he said.

“Last minute change of plans,” I told him. “Is that a problem?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Also, we were instructed to give you this.”

He handed Jessie a fat, weighty beige envelope, thick enough for a stack of legal documents. She waited until he headed into the cockpit to tear open the flap and hand out the contents. It was the gear we’d left with Linder in Boston—our Bureau sidearms and our badges—along with a slim, black USB stick. I tossed the stick to Kevin.

“Looks like a message from HQ,” I told him. “Let’s see what it says.”

He slotted the stick, and we gathered around the laptop screen as the jet’s engines revved. A video flickered to life, showing a neon wire map of Orlando while Linder’s voice issued our new briefing.

“Good work on the recovery,” he said. “Given the new intelligence you’ve acquired, we agree that the top priority is returning the curse tablet to low Earth orbit. To facilitate this, you’ll be calling upon a friendly by the name of Dr. Alonso Huerta.”

The map dissolved into a faded file photograph. Huerta, maybe in his midfifties and portly, sported a walrus mustache.

“Dr. Huerta has access to an imminent satellite launch at the Kennedy Space Center,” Linder continued. “He can ensure the tablet is securely and quietly added to the satellite payload. Your task is to deliver it to him. There’s a catch: the doctor is timid about his involvement with Vigilant Lock, and does not, under any circumstances, want you anywhere near his office or his coworkers.”

The photograph faded, replaced with another map. Street directions scrolled along the right side of the screen, lit up in electric blue, and I committed them to memory as I listened. Tradecraft 101: memorize every detail. You might not get a second chance.

“As he hasn’t worked with your cell before, he has requested a public meeting for his own safety. This is the Mall at Millennia, an indoor shopping center on International Drive. Dr. Huerta will be waiting outside the entrance to Macy’s. You are to give him the confirmation word
Starshine
, then provide him with the package once he gives the counterconfirmation
Aurora
.”

The map pulled back, green lines following a winding highway. More driving instructions.

“Once the handover is complete, you are to discreetly follow Dr. Huerta, infiltrate the Kennedy Space Center, and ensure his part of the mission is successful. I’ve assured him that he is completely safe, which is unfortunately untrue, but he won’t know any better so long as you stay out of sight. You need to become the invisible guardian angels on his shoulder. Protect the doctor—without him knowing you’re doing it—and remain on-site until that satellite launches. Linder out.”

The video disappeared with a burst of static.

“All right,” Jessie said. “A handoff, a discreet tail, and we are
done
. Any questions? No? Good. Buckle up, everybody. We’re going to Florida.”

I sank back in the plush leather seat as the jet lifted off into a black sky. Another midnight flight, another six hours of rumbling engines and turbulence. It wasn’t until I had no choice but to sit still that I realized how exhausted I was. Still, plane sleep was just a fumbling parody of the real thing, an endless string of drowsy naps and waking jolts that left me just as bone-tired as when we took off.

One foot in front of the other,
I thought.
That’s how the job gets done.
At least I could console myself with the knowledge that the hard part was over. We’d beaten the bad guys, claimed the prize, and all that remained was a simple bit of cleanup work. Easy.

Right.