when he’d taken his new position as head of security at the World Trade Center in New York City. His first day on the job was about three weeks before the day he died a hero: September 11, 2001.
Stuart Kearns’s FBI career had likewise been derailed by his outspokenness and his association with O’Neill, but he’d stubbornly chosen to try to ride out the storm rather than quitting. A bureaucracy never forgets, though, and they’d kept pushing him further and further out toward the pasture until finally, for the last several years, he’d been banished so far undercover that he sometimes wondered if anyone even remembered he was still an agent at all.
“Slow down, slow down,” Danny said.
Kearns let his foot off the gas and looked over. “What is it?”
“Do me a favor and take this exit here, right up ahead.”
At the top of the off-ramp there was little indication of anything of interest beyond advertisements for nearby food, gas, and lodging. Oh, and an eye-catching billboard for the Pussycat Ranch.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kearns said.
“We’ve had a rough night, Stuart, and I’d like to have a beer.”
“I’ve got beer at home.”
“A beer in a can in a house trailer with another dude and a beer in a Nevada brothel are two totally different things, and right now I need the second one.”
Surprisingly enough, Kearns didn’t put up a fight. He followed the signs along the circuitous route to the place without complaining, and pulled up into a parking spot near the end of the lot in front.
Danny got out of the van, straightened his clothes, and looked back. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“No, I don’t think so. Fake or not, I’m not going to leave an atomic bomb unattended in the parking lot of a roadhouse.”
“Okay, your loss. Can you spot me a hundred until payday?”
“I don’t have a hundred.” Kearns took out his wallet, removed a bill, and handed it to Danny through the open door. “I’ve got twenty. I’m going to try to make a phone call while I’m waiting out here, but don’t take all night. We’re getting up early in the morning.”
“With twenty dollars I doubt if I’ll be ten minutes.”
“And I know I don’t have to tell you to watch what you say and who you say it to,” Kearns said. “Just have your drink and come back out. Don’t make me come in there after you.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Inside, he’d barely taken a seat at the bar and placed his order when one of the more fetching young ladies of the evening caught his eye and invited herself over.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“That’s a loaded question in a place like this, isn’t it?”
She frowned a bit and looked at him a little closer. “Do I know you, mister?”
The bartender had returned with his beer, taken his twenty, and left a ten-dollar bill in its place. Danny picked up his glass and his change and took the woman’s hand.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“My name’s Tiffany.” Her eyes lit up suddenly. “You’re that guy,” she whispered, “on the Internet, in that video.”
“I am indeed,” Danny said. He leaned in a little closer. “And Tiffany, I need for you to do me a little favor.”
In her room in back he gave his new friend an autograph and his last ten dollars, and that bought him five minutes alone with her cell phone.
As he composed the text message to Molly Ross he began to realize how little intelligence he actually had to pass along. He knew the code name of this operation he’d become involved in; he’d seen it on the paperwork they’d made him sign upon his release from jail. He knew when it was going down, and where. And he knew something was going wrong, and that the downward slide might be just beginning.
Outside at the bar the television had been showing the news, and in the crawl along the bottom he’d seen that over the weekend the national terrorism threat level had been raised to orange, the last step before the highest. Maybe that was related to this thing with Kearns, maybe not. All he could do was tell her to try to keep everyone in their movement well clear of the area, and hope for the best.
He checked the message one last time, and hit send.
molly -
spread the word -- stay away from las vegas monday
FBI sting op -› * exigent *
be safe
xoxo
db
CHAPTER 28
A small fragment of his awareness saw everything clearly from a mute corner of his mind, but that part had given up trying to rouse the rest of him. Noah still lay where Molly had left him, not exactly asleep but a long way from consciousness.
He heard a faraway pounding and muffled shouts coming from somewhere outside the churning darkness in his head. These sounds didn’t raise an alarm; they only blended themselves smoothly into his bad dream.
His nightmares had grown infrequent as he’d gotten older, but they’d always been the same. No slow-motion chases, shambling zombies, or yellow eyes peering from an open closet door; the running theme of his nocturnal terrors was nothing so elaborate. In every one he was simply trapped, always held by something crushing and inescapable as his life slowly drained away. Buried alive in a tight pine coffin, pinned and smothering beneath a pillow pressed to his face by powerful hands, caught under the crush of an avalanche, terrified and helpless and knowing he’d already begun to die.
This time it was deep water. He could see daylight glinting off the waves high above; all the air he needed was there, but it was much too far away. As he tried to swim up every stroke of his arms only sent him farther downward, until at last some primitive instinct took over and demanded that he inhale. Salt water rushed into his straining lungs, heaved out, and poured in again, burning like acid.
This was the part where he knew he had to wake up, because if he didn’t he was sure the dream would kill him. But it wouldn’t let him go.
There was a boom, a clattering much louder than the earlier sounds, then a grip on his shoulders, someone shaking him. He struggled against the pressure and somehow forced his eyes open.
Black things were crawling across the floor and up the walls, across his arms, and over the face of the man above him. He flailed at them and lost his balance, rolling to the floor and hitting it hard. People ran past, guns drawn and shouting. One older woman knelt next to him and opened the bag she’d set down beside her. She touched his face, said his name as though it was a question, and held open one of his eyes with the pad of her thumb. A hot white light shone in, so bright it stung, and he tried to pull away.
“Easy,” the woman said, and she made a motion to someone behind him.
Others came, and Noah felt the buttons of his shirt being undone, hands moving over him as though they were feeling for something, and then a pain and a tearing sound, like a patch of carpet tape had been ripped from his upper chest near the shoulder. One of his sleeves was pulled up and something cold and wet rubbed against the vein at the bend of his elbow.
“You might feel a little pinch,” the woman said.
He looked down and watched the gradual pierce of a hypodermic needle, but felt only a distant pressure and then a chill trickling up the vessel as the plunger was pushed to its stop. The room had begun a slow spin with him at its center.
The doctor snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Noah? Can you tell me what year it is?”
“Where am I?”
