In a hotel room not far away, James Quincy fumed at his television screen. That bitch. Did she think he was bluffing? Did she think he wouldn’t release those pictures? Hell, he was planning on releasing them in a few months anyway, just for spite. Now, he’d make sure they were above the fold in every major newspaper in the country if he had to paste them there himself.
But that was for later. First he had to salvage his sinking ship. Quincy picked up a cell phone and dialed a number. It rang only once. “I’m watching the news, too,” said a voice on the other end.
“I can’t believe it,” Quincy said.
“I can. She’s got big balls. You gotta admire it.”
“There’s no other choice now but to make her irrelevant. Everything’s in place for our other plan, isn’t it?”
“Like I said it would be. I’ve been moving that little project along as though this one wasn’t going to work. Which it didn’t.”
“Stop saying I told you so,” Quincy said irritably. “Just get it done.”
He hung up. He hit the mute button on his remote to silence Debrah Drexler, but that gave him only mild satisifaction. He picked up the phone to call his office. At least he could console himself with the release of the pictures.
“Thanks for coming. Thanks!” Drexler said to the tiny squad of reporters now grumbling and exiting the conference room. Her press people were going to hear some gripes about this, but she didn’t care. She was giddy with excitement.
She practically floated back into her office and closed the door, then dialed Kelly Sharpton’s number. When he answered, she trilled, “You, sir, are hereby granted divinity. You’re a god. How did you do it?”
“It wasn’t that hard.” Kelly’s voice was flat.
“What about — are there any other copies anywhere?” she asked, some of the happiness leaving her voice. “I mean, if it’s digital. ”
“My bug will keep tracking down any links to those pictures and wipe them all out.”
“What about hard copies?” she asked
“I doubt there are any. This was old stuff, and there was no one attached to the crime anymore. If it’s from the San Francisco archives, which it probably was, they transferred all their data to digital years ago, except for forensics, of course. Odds are the actual pic was destroyed once they had a clean scan. They’re even lucky they had this much.”
“We should get together again. For a drink,” she added quickly. “I owe you, Kell. God, do I owe you. So much.”
He heard the euphoria return to her voice. He felt proud to have saved her, he had to admit — it was some kind of ridiculous digital age version of a caveman protecting his mate. But he also knew that something was missing. It wasn’t just that he felt dirty, which he did. He had just exercised a gross abuse of power, and he’d done it with an ease and lack of conscience that horrified him. But no, it wasn’t just remorse for an ethical lapse that bothered him. It was personal. The clean sharp edge had been shaved off his longing for her, leaving a jagged scar. “You don’t owe me, Deb. And I don’t think drinks are a good idea.”
The heavy tone of his voice dragged her out of the clouds. “What?”
“You were going to do it, weren’t you? Give up your vote. Just like that.”
She stammered, “I hoped you’d…I mean you al-ways…I would have—” She stopped. This wasn’t the press or the public. This was Kelly. “Yes,” she said at last. “I was going to give in.”
He nodded. “You definitely don’t owe me, then. What I did just now, I did my job. Bye, Deb.” He hung up on her.
Jack never remembered his dreams. His wife told him that he often muttered in his sleep, and even jumped out of bed some times, but he never recalled what he’d said or why he’d jumped up. For him, unconsciousness passed by in a blink — the split second of darkness that separated one moment of awareness from the next.
That’s how it was for him then, as his eyes popped open. He was lying on his side on the floor of the library. The bookcase was on its side, but at least it wasn’t on top of him anymore. Books lay were they fell, scattered in ones and twos. Jack tried to move, and immediately he knew three things. First, his face had been bleeding and might still be bleeding. Second, he wasn’t alone in the room. And third, his hands and feet were tied.
He pulled his knees up to his chest and rolled to a sitting position. The room shook back and forth before his eyes and his stomach twisted, and that gave him more information, none of it good. Nausea. Possible concussion. Worry about it later. There was another change in the room, aside from the fallen bookcase. Another prisoner. The old woman was now completely bound, as were the husband and wife. But the young man had been taken away, and Nazila Rafizadeh had joined them.
Jack shook his head. “I told you to wait.”
She shrugged.
The man whispered, “They said they’d kill us if we talk.”
“I bet they did,” Jack replied.
The man and the woman were frightened. The older woman, probably the mother of the husband or the wife, looked the toughest. The man and woman were plump and well-fed, the man’s salt-and-pepper hair so smoothed by hair spray that even dragged from sleep he looked well-coiffed. The grandmother was thin and sharp as a hawk, her nose bent like a beak and her small black eyes glaring at him as though this was all his fault.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked Nazila.
She nodded. “I’m sorry. I saw you draw your gun and I thought you were going in to arrest him. ” She trailed off without finishing.
The wife, her eyes glazed with tears, whispered, “Are they…are they going to kill us?”
Jack said quietly, “I don’t know. Just stay calm and don’t make any trouble and you’ll be okay. They don’t want you. You’ve seen them, but they’re not professionals. They might let you go.”
He didn’t tell them that they’d been professional enough to station a layoff man who’d snuck up behind him, or that that man had been professional enough to catch him by surprise. He also didn’t tell them that on the sodium cyanide job, the one where he’d betrayed them, they’d planned on killing the plant manager. Jack mentally kicked himself. He’d been in too much of a hurry. He should have cleared the entire house before making contact with the first two. Then he shook those thoughts from his head. There was plenty of time for a postmortem later, as long as it wasn’t
He listened. They were in the next room, talking in angry voices. He heard a fourth voice pleading. That was Ramin.
“Where are your friends? Tell us where they are!”
“I don’t know what you mean. Please, no!” The sound of a hard slap interrupted his words.
“Fucking raghead,” said one of the militia men. “We know you know them. We know they’re here. Tell us!”
Ramin sobbed.
“My hand’s starting to hurt,” said one of the Greater Nation men. “Let’s try something else.”
“Get him over to the wall,” said another. “Cut the cord off that lamp.”
Jack examined the bindings at his ankles. Rip hobble cords. He could feel the same tight plastic strips cutting into his wrists behind his back. Rip hobble cords were strong and unbreakable, a heavy-duty version of the plastic ties people used to seal garbage bags. Police officers used them during mass arrests when they’d run out of handcuffs. If you pulled them tight enough, they were nearly impossible to wriggle out of. There was no release mechanism — they had to be cut off.
He searched the room and made a mental inventory of its contents: four other prisoners, floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books, one fallen bookcase, small couch, small desk with a reading lamp.
“How long has that lamp been on?” he asked.
“What?” the husband asked.
“That lamp. How long?”
The man said, “I don’t know. I was in here doing work when they came in. It’s been on for perhaps two
