descending into the darkness. The lake’s depth varied from twenty to three hundred feet, but at this point under the bridge it was sounded at only twenty-five. Not that the depth would have any bearing on his chances for survival.
Lungs burning, the pressure in his ears growing with every foot of his descent, Nick was pulled toward his death.
And the weight hit bottom. Nick floated upside-down like a sunken buoy. Stars danced in the periphery of his watery vision. Shafts of light glistened and broke the surface above, refracting about the depths, lighting the rocky, silt-covered lakebed.
Being a swimmer, Nick could hold his breath for far longer than most, but he had no idea of the time, nor how long his lungs could truly hold out.
But it wasn’t his pain he dwelled upon, not the suddenness of his inevitable death. It was Julia. Everything that was good in his life, everything worth living for, had been taken. He felt a crushing shame that he couldn’t save her from her fate. He had been so easily deceived, so gullibly accepting in the help of strangers, only to be thrown to his death by those who were paid to protect.
Nick was upside-down, steadily exhaling a very small amount of air to keep his nostrils from filling up and drowning him prematurely. With the glow of the surface light above, he finally caught his bearings when something bumped up against his upward-facing legs. Nick jerked his body around and stared into the vacant eyes of the dead.
There was a body, floating upright, bobbing about, his wrists cuffed together, his legs tied, with the plastic ties wrapped about a similar iron plate. And there was another body ten feet behind it. Nick couldn’t see it well, but there was no mistaking the uniform on the skinny, redheaded man. It was a police officer. And through the white shafts of light that cut down through the water, he saw the shadows of a third, dressed in a blue shirt, his long dark hair wafting in the shifting currents. He was in a graveyard, an assassin’s underwater dumping ground.
Seeing the corpses, Nick instantly understood why Dance had mentioned deja vu.
The man immediately next to him was freshly dead, his half-mast eyes revealing rolled-back pupils, his right eye was swollen, black and blue, his mouth slack- jawed, the left side of his lower lip distended as if someone had danced on his face before killing him. He had gray hair that drifted about his face like wind-whipped grass.
Nick’s lungs began to burn, his air running low. He knew it had been a minute. Another forty-five… maybe sixty seconds and he would pass out.
He grabbed the bicycle chain that tethered him to his death anchor and pulled himself slightly deeper. He grabbed hold of the belt of the man adjacent to him, reached into his pocket with his cuffed right hand, and pulled out his wallet, holding it tight as if it would somehow save him.
But it was a useless final act. His lungs were on fire, his head throbbing with the final pulsing of his oxygen-deprived heart. It had been over two minutes, there was no doubt he would die, surrendering to the seductive call of death.
And as the last bit of oxygen fed Nick’s thoughts, he dwelled on Julia, her beauty, her kindness, and how the world would be robbed of her presence because…
Because he had failed her.
CHAPTER 5
2:00 P.M.
JULIA SAT IN HER SUV in the driveway of a modest split-level colonial in the town of Pound Ridge. Like so many of the people in Byram Hills, once Julia learned of the crash, she had rushed to the site to help. But when her eyes fell on what remained of Flight 502, and she realized it was the flight she was supposed have been on, she couldn’t stop picturing the faces of the passengers she had been sitting next to and how close she had come to sharing their fate.
Instead of working at the scene, she agreed to go pick up a doctor who had been called out of retirement to help with the emergency effort. She had driven up to Bedford a half hour earlier to get gas and now waited outside the doctor’s home while he gathered his things.
As she sat alone, her mind a whirlwind of thoughts, the full impact of what she had escaped finally fell upon her: She was not the only one who had escaped death; Julia placed her hand on her belly, knowing that two lives had been saved today.
The irony was she was on the plane heading up to Boston not for a meeting as she had told people but rather to see her doctor.
She and Nick had lived in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a year after being married. He had been transferred up there and she followed him, finding a job with a small firm in Boston. A colleague had recommended a doctor by the name of Colverhome, a man who not only maintained an impeccable reputation, but had a manner that was both gentle and humorous.
After moving back to Byram Hills, she never changed doctors, finding it easy enough to schedule her annual exam to coincide with a business trip.
She had called him earlier in the week to tell him of her suspicion, and he had arranged for a local doctor to give her a pregnancy test. The test was positive-six weeks pregnant. It filled her with an elation she had never known. She was bursting to tell Nick but had wanted to make it special. So she had arranged with Colverhome to fly up for a prenatal exam and a sonogram of the small beginnings of their child that she could frame and surprise Nick with over a romantic dinner this evening at La Cremaillere. It was the restaurant where he had asked her to marry him, it was the beginning of their life together, a monumental occasion, and she wanted the same gravitas for this most blessed-and surprising-of events. Their morning argument, the one that sent Nick into such a foul mood, had been over a dinner that would never happen. Their plan with the Mullers was a ruse to throw Nick off what would be one of the most profound moments in their sixteen-year relationship.
While they had planned on children, she didn’t intend to get pregnant until next year. Their lives were so structured, with their careers, with building a nest egg to allow them to comfortably raise children, that the actual thought of pregnancy had been far from her mind. She realized now that they had spent so much time planning, working to achieve a level of success before having kids, that the thought of actually carrying a child had become foreign.
The news of her pregnancy had taken her by surprise, and she knew it would absolutely floor Nick.
She had been so absorbed in her career as an attorney hoping to make partner that she had lost countless friends who had journeyed into motherhood leaving their aspirations behind. But the moment the pregnancy was confirmed her focus changed entirely. She knew it wasn’t hormones, it wasn’t some false sense created by the fantasy of not working. It was simply love.
She and Nick had been together for half of their lives now. They had more money then they needed, they had bought and renovated their dream home, traveled and enjoyed life. And yet, there was a void. A void that was acutely felt at the holidays. She longed for the return of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Halloween candy.
AS JULIA THOUGHT of the plane crash, of all the lives lost, of the kind, older woman whom she had been sitting next to, tears filled her eyes. She had been called off the jet by an automatic text message that stated that Shamus Hennicot’s Washington House had been breached. It was that call that had allowed her to live another day. But not just one life had been saved. Two lives had been rescued from death’s grip.
She took it as sign that this child was meant to be. As far as she was concerned it was a miracle.
Initially annoyed, thinking it to be a false alarm, she had exited the plane, hopped right into her car, and gone to Washington House. She walked the perimeter, checking all the doors, all the windows, finding them all secured.
But upon entering, she knew something was amiss. She had been inside for all of thirty seconds when a rumble shook the house. The china in the cupboards rattled, the glasses in the bar clinked as if an earthquake had hit the area. While there was a deep fault under the New York granite mantle, earthquakes were as few and far between as snowball fights in Bermuda. The lights flickered, fighting to stay on, and went out. The emergency lights quickly flashed on, illuminating the stairwells and exit doors. Intermittent beeps sounded from the computer battery backups signaling the power failure and shutdown protocol. She looked at her watch: 11:54. She should have been on her way to Boston instead of walking about in a power-deprived vacant house that shook from the slippage of some fissure deep beneath the county.
She headed to the kitchen, ran her security pass card over the reader, knowing it had a twenty-four-battery backup, and opened the heavy fire door to the basement. The overly bright halogen emergency light guided her down the stairs, its glow abusing the expensive fleur-de-lis wallpaper that Hennicot had had shipped from Paris. She punched her Social Security number in on the keypad and waved her magna-card over the card reader three times. She pulled out the octagonal security key, inserting it, with the letter D on top, into the large brushed-steel vault door.
With a forceful turn, she opened the door and was greeted by darkness. Pulling a chair over, she propped the door open, allowing the bright wash of light to pour forth.
Her eyes immediately fell on the broken display cases in the center of the room, the out-of-place red-domed box on the wall. An anger instantly rose in her, as if she herself had been violated. She walked about opening doors, poking her head in. An emergency light was lit in the climate-controlled storage room; it didn’t appear any of the crates had been disturbed. She walked back through the main room, through the shaft of halogen light pouring out of the stairwell, and opened the door to Shamus’s office. She stepped right to the hidden wall panel door, seeing it cracked open, and pushed it in.
The room was almost completely dark. Slight reflections of the outer room’s light danced about, but not enough for any clear vision.
She knew there were only two items in the room. In the center. She took two cautious steps forward, her eyes desperately trying to adjust, and came upon the safes. She ran her hand over the first, finding it closed, but the second… she didn’t bother with any tactile investigation. She could just make out the shadow of the thick open door.
And all at once, she felt fear wash over her.
She had entered the house and come down here instantly to confirm the robbery, her anger blinding her to the danger as she ran about in the darkness, foolishly tempting fate. Julia had never been stricken with claustrophobia, but now she felt the darkness closing in on her. She didn’t know if anyone was in here, if someone was hidden behind a doorway, feeling trapped like a wild animal, prepared to kill her in order to make his escape.
This was not a good day to die.
She charged out of the room and up the stairs. She pulled out the octagonal key and opened the hidden security room behind the false wall in the pantry. Her eyes fell immediately on the broken computer servers, the hard drives torn out and missing. Whoever pulled this off knew exactly what to do, knew exactly how to erase their tracks.
Julia was thankful for the redundant backup in her office, resident not only on her computer but also on the company server. Whoever pulled this job would never
