the 13th Hour (26 page)

You already feel guilty about losing Dad without ever
reconciling with him. Know this, the future is coming and if
you don't help Nick, Julia will be dead before the sun sets and
the fault and guilt will lie squarely on your shoulders if you
don't do what he asks.

With sincerest imploring,
Me--which is you, Marcus Bennett

M
ARCUS STARED AT
his signature, at the raised corporate seal that he hadn't removed from his desk in weeks. He reached back into the envelope and pulled out the online
Wall Street Journal
headline page and quickly scanned it.

A whole minute went by before he looked up at Nick.

Without a word he picked up his phone and dialed.

"Helen? It's me. I need to speak to Jason right away."

Marcus listened.

"What do you mean he's not in," Marcus yelled into the phone. "Don't tell me that. Give me his assistant."

There was a five-second pause.

"Christine, it's Marcus, where's Jason?"

R
ACING DOWN
S
UNRISE
Drive in Marcus's Bentley Continental GTC convertible, Nick was glad not to be driving for once today. Glad to have an ally he could trust implicitly. Nick had called and found Julia at the gas station just north of town in the village of Bedford. With all of the stations and pumps in town closed, she had driven the five miles to fill her nearly empty tank before heading to pick up a doctor who was needed to help with the recovery effort.

With a quiver in her voice, Julia had told him of getting off Flight 502 before it left. He told her not to move, to get into her car and wait for him there.

"I can't believe Jason is dead." Marcus shook his head. "I had no idea he was going up to Boston."

"I'm sorry," Nick said.

They fell silent.

"I'm pretty convincing." Marcus finally broke the moment, alluding to his letter as he cut through the ghost town of Byram Hills.

"Thank God." Nick nodded, looking at Washington House as they drove past.

"This whole thing is too incredible. But you've got tell me what's going on."

It took Nick five minutes to bring Marcus up to speed, about his near scrapes with death, about Dance and Dreyfus and Julia and the mahogany box.

Nick pulled out the gold pocket watch and opened it, holding it out for Marcus to see.

"Put it away," Marcus said.

"You don't want to see it?"

"Sometimes in life there are some things we shouldn't see, some things we shouldn't know."

As they headed up Route 22 past Sullivan Field, they both fell into silence. Flames licked the sky as heavy black smoke filled the air, blotting out the sun. It was 1:15, fire departments from Banksville, Bedford, Mount Kisco, Pleasantville, and five other jurisdictions supplemented the Byram Hills volunteers who had been fighting the raging conflagration for over an hour now, in a battle that would have no winners.

"Don't take this the wrong way, because what you are doing is the right thing to do and I would do the same, but have you thought about how your actions are changing the future? Have you thought about the impact every step or interaction will have?"

A red Toyota four-runner flew past Marcus, cutting him off as it raced off to who knows where.

"Our actions have far-reaching implications that we never see." Marcus pointed to the Toyota as it disappeared down the road. "The simple act of a reckless driver can initiate a domino sequence of events affecting hundreds of lives, each of which in turn affects every life it touches.

"A man races down a highway, causing an accident, which delays countless people from making it home on time. And among those delayed is a doctor whose small child ingests a rubber ball, clogging his airways, his panicked babysitter has no idea what to do, and the three-year-old dies. Now, if the child's father was to make it home when he was scheduled to, he would have Heimliched the kid, clearing the ball, and they all would have sat down to a normal dinner. And then that child would grow up to cure cancer, as he was so inspired by his father."

"Makes you want to kill the asshole on the highway doesn't it?" Nick said.

"But who knows what fate holds? What if that child grew up and cured cancer?"

"He cures cancer, you said that," Nick said.

"But . . ."

"There's always another but--"

"But in so doing he created something far worse that killed millions. If we were to know all that, then that maniac driver just saved millions of lives. Who's to say what the consequences of our actions, whether noble or selfish, will be for the future?"

"For the want of a nail," Nick said, referring to the old poem.

"For the want of a nail." Marcus nodded in agreement.

As Marcus continued up the highway, the bright midday sun painted a glare on the world. He slipped on his mirrored sunglasses and reached into the side pocket of his door, pulled out some sun-screen, and rubbed it on his bald head.

"My God, though." Marcus laughed. "Think of what could happen with the power you hold in your hand."

"I'd be a hit at the horse races." Nick laughed in return.

"Horse races? How about the stock market? Business deals? Knowing your opponents' moves before they make them?" Marcus pulled the envelope addressed to himself from his pocket, pulled it out, and looked at the
Wall Street Journal
page. "Do you realize just with this almost-four-hour advance information, I could make millions?"

"Okay, glad to see the capitalist in you is still alive."

"Seriously, think about international relations, peace negotiations. You could change the course of history, prevent disasters and . . ." Marcus paused. "Plane crashes."

Nick listened to Marcus. His thoughts having been so singularly focused on Julia, he hadn't pondered the value of what he held in his hand.

"It could change the outcome of murder trials, the capture of criminals . . ." Marcus's tone returned to bitter truth. "The outcome of wars. In the wrong hands--and that's just about everyone's--that thing is as dangerous as can be. The power of knowing the future could corrupt even the most noble heart."

Nick had not given much thought to the dark purposes of what he held and the consequences it could produce.

"Promise me you'll destroy it once you're sure Julia is safe."

"You have my word," Nick said.

Marcus looked again at the
Wall Street Journal
page, stuffed it back into the envelope and handed it to Nick. "I can't tell you how tempting that is. With one phone call . . ."

Nick tucked the envelope into his pocket. "Glad to see not all men are so easily corruptible."

"Nick." Marcus turned to him. "Does Julia know about her death?"

Nick shook his head. "She experienced it, it happens, but that's hours from now. As far as she knows, right now, she feels lucky to be alive, having gotten off that plane."

"I'll never get used to this concept." Marcus shook his head. "You talk about the future as if it's the past."

"It's how life has been running for me for eight hours now."

"With no continuity, with no one else remembering what happened, how do you keep it straight? I couldn't keep my mind focused."

"I just think of Julia. I don't care about time, I don't care about anything right now but finding and stopping her killer. She gives me all the focus I need."

F
LAMES CLIMBED SIXTY
feet into the sky, the intense heat like a force field preventing the fire crews from getting within fifty yards. The roar of the fire sounded like an inhuman beast as it singed the air, searing the metal of the fuselage.

White cloudlike foam had been shot across the debris field to aid in dousing the gas fire. Eight water cannons and countless hoses arced streams across the sky, fighting the spreading flames as they nipped at the surrounding woods.

The tanks in the wings were mercifully half full for the short flight to Boston; no need to endure the cost of the additional weight with the price of gasoline these days. But that small piece of good luck was lost on the firemen who fought desperately to contain the three thousand gallons of impossibly flammable liquid.

Men in fire suits searched the grounds in hopes of a miracle but found nothing but shattered bodies, and mere splinters of metal. National Guardsmen arrived by the truckload to supplement the effort. Crowds of the curious, morbid, and shocked looked on before being escorted away or led to assist.

Dance walked about the perimeter of the flaming wreckage, ignoring the wayward water spouts dousing the flames as they sprinkled on his blue blazer. With all of the death before him, all of the senseless loss and suffering, Dance didn't feel a moment of pity; he couldn't muster a tear of sympathy for the dead. Somewhere in there was the body of Sam Dreyfus, somewhere in there was the box he wouldn't part with, a box whose value was inconceivable. If a millionaire like Sam Dreyfus wanted it instead of all of that gold, all of those diamonds, its worth had to be in the hundreds of millions.

He couldn't help smiling, knowing that Dreyfus had gotten what he deserved. He hoped he had been fully aware of his imminent death as the plane fell out of the sky.

There was no fear in Dance of someone's getting near the box--if it had survived the crash--before he did. The crash site was a crime scene, and anyone caught stealing from here would be facing multiple felonies in addition to public scorn. If the heavy wooden box had managed to survive, nobody would know what it was, and Dance, as a detective in the crash's jurisdiction, would procure access to the debris holding area and steal it before anyone was the wiser.

With Sam Dreyfus's betrayal and death, it was up to Dance and his men to clean up the evidence, to find and erase the security tapes, to track down anyone who might have seen them.

When Sam Dreyfus had contacted him a month ago, Dance had thought it was an internal affairs setup. He thought the police-police had finally caught up to him and were luring him with promises of gold and diamonds.

But with the research tools of a detective at his disposal, he found Dreyfus to be the impotent younger brother of DSG's chairman and founder, the designer and installer of the security system for Shamus Hennicot's Washington House. And while DSG's chairman, Paul Dreyfus, was hailed as a brilliant, hardworking innovator, Sam Dreyfus was his absolute antithesis, a consummate failure, always looking for more, never appreciating his ridiculous income and the lifestyle he led.

Sam Dreyfus was the perfect partner in crime: a man of weak character, an individual he knew he could control. He was also a miracle, sent by the devil himself, one that would help ensure Dance's survival and keep Ghestov Rukaj at bay for good.

Dance had looked at drug dealers to rob, evidence rooms to rip off, criminals to blackmail, but none of the prospects would net him anywhere near the million-dollar bounty he was to pay for his own life.

As much as Rukaj's ultimatum enraged him, he knew there was nowhere to turn, nowhere to run. The Albanian had connections everywhere, listening, watching, following whomever he chose. There would be no sympathy for a crooked detective, someone who would be hated by cop and criminal alike. And Rukaj's reputation was based on history, not rumor. The executions he had personally participated in were legendary for their slow, unending torture, his victims pleading for death hours before it mercifully embraced them. There was no question Rukaj had Dance by the balls, and the only way out was one million dollars.

Dance had met Sam Dreyfus four times at Shun Lee Palace in Manhattan, going through the job, the plans, the security, and how they would fence their ill-gotten gains. Sam explained that there had to be a secondary backup for the security's video feeds and that if it wasn't in the police station then it had to be in Hennicot's locally based attorney's office.

Sam confirmed that Hennicot's lawyer was Julia Quinn at Aitkens, Lerner, & Isles and that the feed ran directly to her computer with a redundant backup on her company's server. Dreyfus was to visit her right after they completed the robbery to review what had happened under the auspices of his company's concern for the break-in. He was then to deposit a virus in her computer system, thereby wiping that piece of the evidence from existence before it was backed up at 2:00
A.M.
to a confidential off-site firm.

But now, as Sam had gone off and died, it fell to Dance to deal with Julia Quinn.

He and his men didn't know from viruses or internal security protocols. They didn't know the law firm's procedures entailed in reviewing security evidence, but Dance had other means of making evidence disappear.