Wu looked at him in the rearview with a gaze cold as chrome. ‘I have my orders. Get you to a safe place where you can be protected and debriefed about the Night Road.’
‘You don’t understand. They have my father. They have my friend. They’ve brought them here.’
‘I have my orders. I’m sorry. I’m just one guy.’ Wu steered onto a highway.
‘For God’s sakes. Please. Aren’t you part of the CIA or something? You can’t be just one guy left.’
Wu didn’t answer.
‘Listen to me.’ He told Wu how Paris had gone wrong. ‘They’re here, within our grasp. They’ve kept my dad alive to pick his brain about Quicksilver, and don’t doubt for a second they will torture him within an inch of his life. And they’re keeping Aubrey alive to access Eric’s accounts at the bank; they think she can help them get inside the bank since she’s a client. If they find this fifty million, they can fund terrorists all over America, they can wreak a hell of a lot more havoc. Terrorism is cheap, they can fund an endless chaos, far more than we’ve ever seen before. They’ve got an Arab billionaire investing in domestic terrorism. Don’t you realize how dangerous they are?’
‘The last thing I can do with Quicksilver in tatters is to attack alone.’
‘You have me.’
‘You. No. You’re not trained.’
‘I’ve held my own.’
‘It would be suicide.’
‘Then let me call the police,’ Luke said, ‘Tell them.’
‘Tell them what?’
‘I have information on a massive attack that the Night Road is planning. They’re massing here in Chicago, to distribute dozens of bombs to their members but I don’t know which cities they’ll hit.’
‘No evidence. No certainty. And you tell them about this, you have to tell them about Quicksilver. I’m not authorized.’
‘There could be thousands of lives at stake. Tens of thousands. I don’t care if you get exposed.’
‘I’m not authorized. I’m just one guy.’
Just one guy. ‘Quicksilver. What exactly is it?’
Frankie Wu said, ‘Quicksilver? Just an element. Just another name for the fleet-footed god Mercury.’
‘Yeah, you all are real fleet right now.’ Luke lifted his Saint Michael’s medal from his shirt. ‘You wear one?’
‘Yeah,’ Wu said, but he didn’t take his hands off the wheel.
‘Why Saint Michael?’
‘When people in the Roman Empire stopped worshipping Mercury, a number of his temples were rededicated to Saint Michael – a symbol of good overcoming evil.’
His father must have been thinking about starting Quicksilver before the Book Club was wiped out. ‘The successor to the Book Club. Thinking in new ways about how to fight threats. Except Quicksilver is much more about the fight, not the theory.’
‘What ever you say.’
‘My father belonged to a secret State Department think-tank called the Book Club. So did my stepfather and Drummond and the guy who died in Houston.’
He waited for Frankie Wu to speak but Wu just arched an eyebrow.
‘So. The Book Club kept predicting with accuracy how the world was changing but kept getting ignored and pushed aside due to political concerns; no one wanted to give credence to a bunch of eggheads who weren’t part of the power structure. But someone knew about the Book Club, and knew my dad was right. Maybe someone in State who’d moved to CIA. Dad got a better job offer and decided to play dead. Maybe to do what he was already doing, concepting and identifying forthcoming threats. The government finally decided to give him a real job. One that no one could know about. The CIA isn’t supposed to operate on American soil…’
Frankie Wu shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. We’re not CIA.’
He thought of the papers he’d seen in the Paris apartment before the bomb blast incinerated everything. The memos, the reports, all were old State Department, not new, annotated to reflect new thoughts, new threats, the notes in the memo. The relatively minor costs of attacks, compared to their huge inflicted economic damage. He remembered the account of the pipeline bombing a few days before in Canada: a few thousand for the explosives, but millions in unrecoverable economic damage.
It was very cheap to wage highly effective war on the infrastructure of civilization.
What had Drummond said? Quicksilver grew out of our earlier work, a new way to fight the bad guys, to stop terrorism before it starts, to bring new thinking to the problem.
A new way.
And after those attacks, we are simply supposed to trust that government will do its job. Protect us. That the various governments of the world, and their multitude of agencies, with their well-intentioned but million moving parts, handcuffed by law and order, will shift into a hitherto unseen efficiency and suddenly develop all the human capital and infrastructure to fight and eliminate every shadow and nutcase, every asshole with a laptop and an agenda.
Uneasiness settled into Luke’s chest. ‘I get it. Quicksilver is funded by private industry. Not any government.’
Frankie Wu met his gaze in the rearview. ‘Should the world’s most powerful companies just sit and wait to get bloodied again? Trust law enforcement and the military and the government to win every battle in a shadowy war? The good guys need help beyond political donations. Help not constrained by legal bureaucracy or political expediency that tries to fight global terrorism like it’s the West versus the Soviets or the Nazis again. It’s not two armies battling each other. It’s not even nations battling each other. It’s networks of people battling each other.’ Wu leaned back. ‘Which is basically the same as corporate warfare, except this time with guns. Your father was a genius.’
Was. Like he was dead again.
‘He was the real brains behind the Book Club. Your stepfather was just a wanna-be, an opportunistic coat- tailer. And while your father took his philosophy to help those who want peace and stability and trade, your stepfather signed on with the opposite team.’
‘Henry thinks he predicted 9/11,’ Luke said. ‘And that no one listened to him.’
Wu snorted. ‘Jesus and Mary, man. Do you think if anyone had written a detailed forecast of 9/11, it would have been ignored? I saw his paper; Drummond sent it to us all when this hell started breaking loose, as part of a psych profile of Henry Shawcross. It was vague in the extreme; he only suggested the possibility that jetliners could be weapons, and he never identified specific targets or groups that could carry it out. Henry Shawcross convinced himself – and only himself – that he was the ignored prophet who could save the world and then got pissed when no one paid attention to him. He’s crazy.’ Wu shook his head. ‘With the bad guys is the only place a man like Shawcross could be a star.’
Quicksilver. A private CIA for the world’s most powerful corporations. Luke could see it, money funneled carefully into security initiatives or perhaps hidden inside fat corporate contracts. Or research. It would be comparatively cheap insurance; fund and field a group of operatives who worked beyond the law to fight terrorists. The operations cost might well be less than the economic damage they would suffer in another cataclysmic attack. You could hide just enough financing, spread out among enough of the companies most sensitive to terrorism. And even if such a group couldn’t be entirely invisible to governments – would they turn a blind eye? Perhaps governments would even offer subtle or implicit support. Another army to fight the rising darkness, one with its hands not tied so closely by bureaucracy, could be a help. Or a disaster.
‘You all aren’t legal.’
‘No. But, until now, we get the job done.’
‘Until now,’ Luke said. ‘Now you’re all too scared to fight back.’
‘What exactly were you planning to trade for your dad?’ Wu asked. ‘They weren’t just going to give him to you.’
‘Trade? Get real. I was just going to kill them and get my dad and my friend back.’ Luke spoke with a matter-of-factness that would have appalled him a week ago. But he meant what he said.
‘Are you suicidal?’
‘No,’ Luke said quietly. ‘But I helped build the Night Road. My stepfather tricked me, but the Night Road exists
