and to leave their corner. ‘It won’t take the police long to find Eric.’
‘No.’
‘And they’ll look for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘And whoever this Mouser man works for, they’ll be looking for me, too.’
‘Yes.’
‘If the police find me, then Mouser finds me.’
‘Well…’
‘They killed the power, Luke. They’re more capable than I ever imagined.’
He sipped coffee. ‘If you talk to the police, you can clear my name.’
‘What will clear your name is finding this money. Prove the motive Eric had to kidnap you. Then you give the money and all the information on the Night Road to the FBI.’
Give it all to the FBI. The fifty million. And his traitorous step-father. He didn’t want Henry in jail. He realized, with shameful anger, that he wanted Henry dead for the hell he’d created for Luke. No. He put his face in his hands, let the wave of hate pass. ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re signing up for, Aubrey.’
‘I can’t tell the police anything more than I told you. I think we should stick together.’
The sense of responsibility weighed on him. He had barely survived his encounters with the Night Road; she had no idea of the brutality they would face. But he saw the resolution in her face and he decided not to argue with her. She wanted to hide, he didn’t blame her. She wanted to help him, for Eric’s sake. ‘So the two kidnapping victims are stuck with each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know how to fight, I don’t know how to run, but I’m not going to let these people get away with what they’ve done, to me or to Eric or to you.’
Her resolve strengthened him. ‘What I don’t understand is – why didn’t Eric just hide with the money? Why not go to Thailand, take the money, run with it?’ he asked.
‘He said tonight, that he had made a deal that would save us. Right before you got there. We were having a glass of wine to celebrate but he hadn’t told me the details yet.’
‘A deal.’
‘A deal where someone powerful would protect us – just like that Mouser man said before he shot Eric.’ She cleared her throat, rubbed at her eyes. ‘I was furious with Eric for getting me involved in this mess. I wanted out and he was trying to convince me I didn’t have a way out except through him.’
‘Who was going to protect him? Maybe they could protect us.’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But he called it a deal. He had to be giving something in exchange.’
‘The fifty million,’ Luke said.
He remembered the pages he’d pulled from Eric’s jacket when he’d gone for the gun. He removed the papers from his back pocket and smoothed them out on the table.
‘What is that?’ Aubrey asked.
‘Papers Eric had in his pocket.’ Each separate page was a printout confirming the opening of an account at a bank. The banks were scattered across America: Tennessee, New York, California, two in Texas, Minnesota, Washington state, Missouri. He didn’t recognize the bank names: they all appeared to be regional banks, not large chains. ‘These must be the accounts he set up for the Night Road.’
‘How would we check to see if they’re empty or not?’
He looked up at her. ‘You think he stashed the money in them?’
‘It would make sense. Maybe he opens the accounts, deposits the money, but he hasn’t given the account information yet to the Night Road. That way, he can still reach the money, even if they can’t.’
‘We can’t go to them; they’re all over the country,’ he said. ‘You have to have a password to access information online or over the phone.’
‘Then step one is finding where Eric hid those passwords,’ she said.
‘Might’ve just been in his head.’
‘That many accounts? No. He was the kind of guy who wrote everything down.’
Two policemen walked into the diner. The two officers gave the restaurant a cursory glance; Luke had his back to them. He sensed the momentary weight of their stare. Aubrey and Luke studied their coffee cups, waiting for the policemen to slide into a booth on the opposite side of the diner and to lose themselves in the study of the menu.
‘We need to go. Now,’ Luke said. Sweat coated his back.
He unfolded money for the bill and they got up and left. Aubrey leaned on him hard, rubbing his back, her pretended affection camouflage. He didn’t look like a cop killer on the solitary run. Luke was careful not to look toward the officers.
When they were out of the diner, she stepped away from him, crossing her arms. They walked for three blocks, found a bus stop, figured out the route to get back to Lincoln Park, where Aubrey’s car sat parked on a side street. The car was a late-model Volvo, and he checked its underside.
‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A gadget that could track you. Like I’m going to recognize that.’ He risked a grin and she smiled, barely, back.
‘Or blow us up. Aren’t I Mary Sunshine?’ Exhaustion cramped her voice.
Luke slid out from under the car. ‘I don’t see anything there that looks totally foreign.’
‘All right.’ They got in; she drove into the dark street.
‘Where to?’
‘Some place we can plan. I need sleep.’ Luke’s fatigue was overwhelming. His body had no adrenaline left. He felt like he had been running forever.
‘Someplace cheap,’ she said.
‘Someplace cheap,’ he agreed.
‘Eric lied about his whole life,’ she said unexpectedly, and tears spilled from her eyes. But not sobs. The tears were steady and controlled and she wiped them off her cheek with the back of her hand. She kept driving and Luke didn’t know what to do until he put his hand over her hand on the steering wheel. Just for comfort.
Neither of them noticed the traffic camera perched on the closest intersection, watching them with its uncaring eye as they pulled away from the curb and drove into the darkness.
26
Snow slept in the motel bed, exhausted from her mending shoulder and her ill-advised murder. Mouser opened his laptop and took a walk along the Night Road.
He felt lonely much of the time but signing onto the Night Road’s private website was like slipping into a warm bath. Happiness, comfort, knowing you belonged. It was a rare sensation for him.
It was not a single website, but rather a fortress of several linked sites, hosted on a Russian server. The sites appeared innocuous – even boring – until you entered a password, and their delights opened up to your eyes. You could not get a password without being cleared by Henry Shawcross. Very few in the Night Road could name, by true identity, another member. He glanced at Snow; he still didn’t know her real name. It was better that way.
He sighed, with relief and pleasure. He read the fresh postings on the site – encoded in Night Road parlance. Celebrations and congratulations on the oil pipeline explosion in Canada. Disguising it as an accident, a Night Road member had managed to inflict millions in economic damage to both Canada and the United States for the tiny investment of five thousand dollars for plastique and transportation costs. Electronic versions of high fives floated in the postings. The E. coli meat poisoning scare from the Tennessee food plant was also mentioned as a triumph, the combined work of two members who hadn’t known each other before being introduced via the Night Road and had pooled resources and knowledge to infect the processing plant and send a wave of panic across American tables. Low cost, high impact.
A select few, proven the most capable, would take part in Hellfire.
