opened up a Web browser window.
“Agent Clark?”
“Yeah,” Deke said quietly, eyes transfixed on the image before him. He had never seen anything more horrific.
“Is your Web browser open?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re seeing the image.”
Yeah, he was seeing the image, which only partially resolved the question of what had happened to Charlie Hardie. There was a time stamp on the image, meant to suggest that the photo had been taken just a few hours ago. There were tubes and tape and other gear implying medical care, but Hardie looked pretty fuckin’ far from
“Is he alive?” Deke asked. “What did you do to his—”
“Let me show you something else.”
The image changed. Now Deke was staring at his own backyard. Not just his backyard, like an image stored in Google’s street view. This was Deke’s backyard as it appeared today, best he could tell. Deke could still see the tan grilling mitt he’d forgotten to bring into the kitchen last night. Last night he’d cooked chicken for Ellie and the kids, preoccupied with thoughts of what he’d tell the reporter the next day. None of that mattered now. Not when they were showing Deke his own house.
“Don’t do this,” Deke said.
“We’re not through yet.”
The image switched again. Now they were inside Deke’s empty living room. He could see the clock on the wall—an oversize, classy thing that Ellie had picked up at Restoration Hardware. Deke tried to figure when they were in his house. Then he noticed the time on the clock; then he looked at the digital clock on his computer. Same exact time. The feed was
“Get the hell out of my house, you son of a bitch.”
The screen jumped back to the original image of Charlie Hardie, which was horrifying on its own.
“You are currently investigating a certain group linked to white slavery. This group has ties to Eastern Europe. You know the investigation, Agent Clark?”
“No. There’s no way I can—”
“You will curtail that investigation immediately.”
“I don’t have that authority.”
“Your boss, Agent Sarkissian, will go along with it. As for your colleagues, you will simply have to convince them that the matter is not worth pursuing at a federal level. Do you understand me?”
“You know what? I’m going to pursue you at a federal level, you son of a bitch.”
The scene image jumped again, cutting away from Hardie. Now Deke was staring at his own bedroom. Ellie’s robe was draped over the bed. She usually showered late in the day, working from home until it was time to pick up the kids from school. She was in the shower right now and had no idea there was someone in their living room…
“And we can continue on to the next scene, Agent Clark. Would you like us to do that? Or perhaps you’d like to skip ahead a little?”
Scene jump: the view outside his daughters’ school. About forty-five minutes until the dismissal bell rang. Deke knew that they would be waiting inside until Ellie pulled up in the car line. But if these thugs were inside the house, then they could easily take the car. His baby girls would have no idea until…
“Would you like us to continue, Agent Clark?”
An invisible, crushing weight pushed down on his chest. Deke was not an emotional man, but he recognized the symptoms of utter heartbreak. He thought of Sarkissian, the strange look on his face, and understood. He thought of Charlie Hardie lying there on that gurney, technically still alive but pulled apart in the most ghastly way Deke could imagine. But he thought more about his wife, Ellie, in the shower, and his girls waiting for their school day to end.
“No,” Deke said softly.
—Popular saying
THE NEXT TIME Hardie woke up he was surprised to find himself sitting in a metal chair and wearing a fairly nice suit.
He couldn’t remember how he ended up in this room, or why he was wearing this suit. Nothing more than fragments. Flashes in a black-and-gray fog. It wasn’t quite amnesia, because he remembered his name and who he was and what he had been doing just a short time ago—namely, being shot to hell in Los Angeles, California, and being patched together by these two jackass doctors. But after that…?
Was there a car?
He swore there was a car involved.
Pieces of it floated around in his mind, like half-remembered parts of a nightmare. A black car. Needles. Blood spraying out the side of someone’s head. The more he thought about it, the more his heart raced. His brain struggled to put the fragments together into linear order. His brain struggled like a computer trying to reboot itself.
He tried to focus on the memory of the car. There was a car, wasn’t there? It was coming back now. Yeah. Definitely a car. A big, black, scary Lincoln Town Car.
Or was that just a memory of a nightmare?
Relax. It’ll come. Don’t force it, don’t freak yourself out.
You’re only in a suit you don’t remember buying, in a room you’ve never seen before.
No reason to panic at all.
The room was wide with a low plaster ceiling. Paint flaked off the walls. The molding looked like real wood, reminding Hardie of his grandparents’ house in North Philadelphia. There was something very 1920s about it. The only nod to modernity was a fluorescent light above him, which flickered every couple of seconds, as if warning:
There wasn’t much here, except the chair Hardie was sitting in, a metal table, another chair, and a filing cabinet tucked in the corner. The fading paint on the walls made it seem like other pieces of furniture had been in this room at some point, long enough to cause discoloration.
Hardie tried to listen for any sounds that would give him a clue as to his location—and somewhere was the faint swelling of violins. Maybe. Those could also be in his head.
His head.
Another piece of memory.
Right. He’d been shot in the head.
Hardie tried to reach up with his right hand and it stopped short. Metal dug into his wrist. He looked down with throbbing eyes and saw that he had been handcuffed to the metal chair.
Well, at least that settled a few things. This wasn’t some dumpy hospital room. He was being kept here, and someone had thought Hardie was enough of a security risk to slap some handcuffs on him. Which was funny, because Hardie felt ridiculously weak, down to the middle of his bones. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so drained. Yet he was still conscious. So at least there was that.
His left hand was free. Hardie tried to lift it, but the muscles in his arm screamed in protest. He forced it anyway, to the point where his fingers actually trembled as they touched the side of his head. The side where he remembered being shot. His hair had been cropped very short, and he could feel the rough edges of a ragged scar on his scalp. No stitches; just the bumpy mountain of skin. Hardie’s fingertips traced the wound about five or six
