He grabbed the mail on the way into the house, shuffling through bills and junk mail and stopping at a large manila envelope from Herr Gottschalk in Dresden. He set the rest of the mail on the deck, leaned against the rail, and tore open the envelope.
He pulled out Gottschalk's business card and a scanned, black-and-white photograph. Nine men stood under a giant swastika circled with German words, the enameled frieze from the stairwell to the Dresden bunker. Circled in red marker, a young man in a windbreaker smiled, one hand in his pocket, the other on the shoulder of the man next to him. With his light hair and dark eyes, he had to be Brian Frahm's grandfather. They could have been twins.
Gottschalk hadn't circled the text beneath the photo. "Joint British-American archeological team, Dresden, Germany, 1958. Photo by Tom Hannes." On the back in severe block letters, Gottschalk had written, "I knew he looked familiar. Uncanny!" Matt frowned, stuffed the photo and envelope in his back pocket, and walked inside.
He stepped through the door, scooped up Ted, and sat down on the couch next to Monica. They chatted about nothings in front of Family Guy reruns—Bartell's public nuisance hearing, the new cheese counter at the grocery store, winter greens from the farmer's market. He let her presence soothe him into something that resembled but wasn't peace of mind, closed his eyes on an enthusiastic giggity and let sleep take him. He woke to the squeak of the deck stair, followed by a strange rumble.
The TV had died. In the pitch black Ted growled again—he'd never done that before—and Monica stretched, groggy. "Is the power out?" The black-and-white ultraviolet mingled with the green infrared background of the house's ambient warmth. The heat registers glowed a modest, fading orange.
"Looks like it," he said, and leaned in close to whisper in her ear. "Something's wrong. Get the shotgun and lock the door. But go easy."
Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, full of worry. She swallowed, then sat up. "I'm going to bed," she said with too much theater. She stretched on her way to the bedroom, hamming it all the way. Ted followed her, still growling, his tail between his legs. Matt followed her, cutting into the bathroom with feigned nonchalance. He didn't turn on the light.
He ran the sink, flushed the toilet, and used the noise to cover his movements. He pulled the .45 ACP from the holster taped under the sink and chambered a round. His late Uncle Jon's model 1911 from Vietnam, a reliable handgun that had never been fired at another human being. He grabbed both spare box magazines and stuffed them into his back pocket, then closed his eyes and listened.
Faint scratches at the deck door. Frantic barking from the bedroom. "Ted, shut up!" Monica yelled, real fear creeping into her fake annoyance.
He eased the door open and looked at their wedding photo in a gold-painted frame on the wall. It held the only place he'd seen Monica's defiant, "bring it on, world" confidence in a long while, and while circumstance had shattered her, she'd been recovering for years and he loved her more than ever. In the fuzzy IR reflection at least two figures crouched on the deck. He held his breath as they picked the lock. The door slid open, and they stepped into the kitchen.
Matt rounded the corner pistol-first and pulled the trigger. The gun roared, and Matt's vision hazed blue in the afterimage. The first shape crumpled as a double-tap took him in the chest. The second staggered backward and fell off the railing, hot blood spraying orange in the infra-red spectrum. Matt dove through the doorway, snatched the fallen man's suppressed REC7 on his way, and rolled off the deck. A suppressed assault rifle chuffed as he hit the ground, bullets tearing through the underbrush.
As he stood, the second commando gasped for breath behind a pair of night-vision goggles, hot red blood leaking through his body armor. Matt crushed his trachea with a brutal stomp, then snatched a pair of grenades from his bandoleer. With an annoyed, curious grunt he pulled the autoinjector from the man's belt and stuffed it into his pocket. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and tossed it at the oak by the corner of the house. It bounced off of the trunk and out of sight. The explosion shattered the front windows. Someone yelled for his mom in an anguish-filled voice.
The whispers gibbered their murderous nonsense as he circled around the deck. The screaming man's left leg lay three feet from the rest of him, and steaming liquid gushed from ravaged arteries. The iron tang of blood mingled with the earthy smell of gunpowder. Matt shot him center-of-mass, then choked up the REC7 and fired another burst into the house. Bullets tore through a man that leaned around the wall, and the grenade dropped from his hands.
"Pomegranate!" someone yelled. Another burst dropped a man as he fled for the counter, and Matt shot yet another in the thigh as he turned to run. The man stumbled to his knees next to the grenade, cried out as he scrambled for it, and blew sideways in a spray of shrapnel. His weapon scattered across the floor, some kind of strange air gun.
Matt picked it up and pulled back the breach. He caught the small canister as it ejected, a light metal object with a needle on the front. The serial number engraved on the bottom sifted through Matt's mind and landed on its significance: level-six muscle enhancement. If the needle hit him, he'd bonk in minutes at most. He tossed it across the floor, tore out the magazine and stuffed it into his pocket, and kinked the barrel over his knee.
He crouched and looked for movement, taking the time to reload from a dead man's bandoleer. Six dead and not one of them augged. He unscrewed the suppressor from the REC7. Except for the aug gun, they used standard ICAP issue, and the man who yelled "pomegranate" had to be either French or French Canadian. Assuming standard tactical doctrine, there were four left in the squad, and at least one more squad on standby. The whispers clawed at his mind, an orgy of desperate bloodshed.
Monica crouched beside the bed, the shotgun trained at the door. Her hands shook, and her lips stretched in a thin line. Ted cowered under the bed as the window exploded inward. She screamed.
Matt shook off the premonition and charged the house. He grunted in pain as a bullet punched through his abdomen, and threw the last grenade left-handed into the living room. Monica screamed as glass shattered in the bedroom, a full five seconds after Matt had seen it. Their shotgun roared even as the grenade went off behind him. He hit the door with his shoulder, splintering it around the lock and catapulting into the room.
A commando sprawled on the floor, his head leaking bright orange in the infrared spectrum, a REC7 on the floor next to him. Ted snarled and worried at his ankle. A second man wrenched Monica's head back by her hair, pressing a black pistol to her neck. A third crouched behind the bed, his assault rifle trained on Matt's center of mass. The shotgun lay on the floor.
Matt froze. Hot blood ran down his stomach, soaking his shirt and jeans. That's three, plus one in the living room. If he's alive. Neither of these men held air guns.
The man holding Monica tightened his finger on the trigger. "Drop your weapon and fold your hands on your head and she won't get hurt." His accent struck Matt as either Spanish or Portuguese.
Monica's eyes flicked downward, barely visible in the moonlight.
"Yeah," Matt said.
As she raised her arms and dropped to her knees, her assailant tried and failed to maintain his grip. Matt pulled the trigger. The three-round burst sprayed bits of bloody skull and brains onto the wall. The other man pulled the trigger. Matt snarled as the full-auto barrage caught him in the chest, shredding his lungs as he fell to the carpet.
He caught himself with one hand and sprang forward. Monica snap-kicked the man in the face, tearing off his goggles. She kicked him again as he rebounded off the wall. Coughing blood, Matt fell on the shotgun and choked it up. The man's eyes widened as he looked down the barrel. "Non!" he cried.
Matt jammed it into his throat and pulled the trigger, then rolled over, training the gun on the door.
His chest itched, and his breath came in wheezes. He tried to talk and couldn't.
"You okay?" Monica asked.
He nodded, then gestured at the shattered window. As he reloaded the shotgun, she busted out the rest of the glass with her fist, draped a pillow over the sill, and clambered out. He handed the weapon out the window, then picked up Ted and passed him through, gritting his teeth against the agony in his chest. He coughed blood as he dragged himself through and fell to the ground five feet below.
"Walker's," he gasped, standing.
She nodded and whispered to the Bassett. "Ted, heel."
They crept through the woods toward Aaron Walker's tree farm. The old man raised eighty acres of Christmas trees and shipped them across the United States. He once bragged about supplying the White House, and sometimes Rockefeller Center. The story changed based on how much he'd had to drink and whether or not his wife heard it and called him a liar. More importantly, he drove a '92 Dodge pickup and kept the keys in the cab.
Freezing dew soaked through Matt's blood-spattered socks. He looked down at Monica's bare feet and impotent rage consumed him, washing out even the burning itch of his lungs stitching back together. A man who can't protect his family is no man at all. Someone shouted behind them, guttural French carrying through the woods. No radio? Matt thought.
He pulled Monica behind a small conifer, kissed her, and leaned in so that his lips almost touched her ear. "Get to the truck," he whispered while reattaching the suppressor to the front of the assault rifle. "Make sure the keys are in it, but don't start it. And don't close the door. Be as quiet as you can." He pulled back and looked into her blue eyes, irises almost black in the moonlight. His heart tore with pride at the determined, fierce look.
She licked her lips, touched them with her fingertips, and looked at them in the moonlight. "You're bleeding."
He took a full breath and didn't want to scream. A good sign. "I know. But I'll be fine. Now go."
She nodded once, scooped up the dog, and took off at a silent trot.
His eyes traced the heat signature of her bare feet on the grass, fading in the cold dew but not fast enough. He bolted across the open space between the tree line and the barn, lifted the latch and heaved open the door. The hinges squeaked, and Buster started baying from inside Walker's house. The collie would bark at anything and everything, and even nothing at all. C'mon, Ted, stay quiet. A good dog by nature, obedience classes had reinforced his desire to please, but he could be headstrong when he wanted to and liked to join the chorus. Nobody who owned a Basset hound would accuse them of being smart.
The horses whickered and stomped as he pulled open their stalls, and Walker's three goats bleated in agitation. Once freed they milled about in confused sleepiness, except for the pony he'd harnessed and secured with a loop to the hitching post just inside the entrance. Ducking to the back of the barn, he pulled the pin on a grenade and dropped it in the cistern, then heaved himself up and over the hay loft. The bang shattered his eardrums, and the animals panicked. He dropped to the floor and followed their mad dash into the darkness outside, pulling the pony with him.
Two horses scattered into the lines of trees, and he led his pony after them, masking his heat signature on the line of approach from his house. Someone muttered off to the right—he caught "pourquoi" and "l'animaux" and nothing else. He dropped to one knee and let off two tight bursts, the second louder than the first. Suppressor's failing. He led the horse over to the bodies of the two men, swapped his weapon for one of theirs, and refilled his bandoleer with grenades.
He turned just as a third man rounded a thicket, air gun raised. Matt stepped forward and knocked the barrel to the side as it spat certain madness, and the commando struck him twice in the torso. Matt smiled as the taut wall of muscle absorbed the blows, then head-butted his opponent square in the face. His skull crunched as it caved in, but Matt wasted no time on satisfaction. He closed his grip on the barrel and rounded the shrub, swinging the weapon like a baseball bat. The collapsible metal stock caught the hiding man in the neck, and a geyser of hot blood sprayed from his shredded carotid artery.
As the man's life pumped onto the ground, Matt scanned the tree line. Behind him, Buster's high-pitched, rolling howl got louder, and a screen door banged closed. In front of him, nothing moved in the darkness. If the other six were out there, they had thermal camouflage. He crouched, bent the barrels of both weapons, and listened.
A throaty rumble rose in the darkness. Helicopter. He ran for Aaron's truck as Buster made a fantastic ruckus trying to herd the panicky animals toward the barn, bounding through the grass, tail wagging in unfettered glee. Matt jumped behind the wheel as a shotgun blast roared into the air from the porch.
"Hey!" Aaron hollered. "You get out of there!" Walker cocked the gun for effect.
Matt yelled back. "Aaron, get inside and stay there. Don't come out until the cops show up, not for anything. Go!" As the sounds of the rotors got louder, Matt took heart that they had a higher pitch than a typical ICAP transport.
Aaron's brow furrowed, but he lowered the gun. "Matt? That you?"
Matt waved, jammed the stick into drive, and hit the gas. "Sorry!" he yelled over the gravel-spitting tires. He accelerated through the trees as Monica cradled a whimpering Ted.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the darkness. "Jeez, babe, you're going to kill us."
"I can see fine," he said, shifting into fourth. Just hope I don't hit anything. He left the lights off. The black-and-white UV overlay helped him drive, and at this speed his mind flooded with precognitive images of countless crashes, which he avoided without slowing down. He bounced through the creek into McMullen's field and ploughed a line straight through the dry feed corn.
"I think I'm going to be sick," Monica said as he veered around the towering oak in the middle of the field, then jerked a hard right to avoid an ancient harvester hidden by the faded yellow stalks.
"Sorry," he said. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head but threw up before she could get the window down, filling the car with the acrid smell of bile and half-digested macaroni and cheese. Ted whined and licked her face, but she didn't open her eyes. They broke the tree line and barreled through pine boughs, the old growth cut high by generations of McMullen hunters. He risked a glance up and saw nothing but trees, then gritted his teeth as the front right tire hit a large root, bashing his head into the ceiling. The truck veered, tilted, and then came back down on four wheels.
He exhaled a sigh of relief and jammed his foot on the brake. The truck careened to a stop just in front of an ancient pine, one that Matt had used in his pre-ICAP days for a hunter's stand. Monica looked at him with wide, bloodshot eyes. "Why are we stopping?"
"That chopper can't see us through the trees," he said, "but they sure as hell know where we went. I think from here I can find the north road, but we've got gullies funneling us. They're sure to have a map, so can figure out where we're going." He killed the engine. "Wait here."
He heard her Wait, what? before she said it and had climbed ten feet up the tree before it left her mouth. The bulky REC7 made it hard to climb, but at least he could breathe again. Thirty feet up, the trees broke enough that he could see stars, and the distant thrum of the helicopter closed in. The sound echoed through the mountains, so he couldn't tell what direction it would come from. If they were smart, they’d circle around to catch them as they exited the far side of the dense pines.
He trained the assault rifle on an empty piece of sky and sucked in a lungful of freezing air. He let it out and took another, happy with his lung function. He frowned. Two squads of commandoes would be massive overkill against a normal threat, and inadequate to the point of stupidity for an aug. But those air guns . . . they were something new. He could only think of one reason to shoot massive doses of GS Augs at a person, and the thought filled him with rage. They wanted me to bonk, to kill my wife, Ted, my neighbors, so they could put me down like a dog and no one would be the wiser. He wondered how many agents had fallen the same way and how many people knew about it.
The thudding rotors grew much louder, and Matt forced all stressful thoughts from his mind. He had to relax. He wouldn't get much of a shot, and it had to count. This wasn't the movies, where a good hit to the gas tank would take—There! The clear heat signature confirmed his hopes: ICAP used US Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and their standard "Black Hole" infrared suppression system would have muddied his vision. This civilian craft had four or five seats and wouldn't have armor or, hopefully, a bullet-proof canopy.
Matt tried to work through the ramifications as the chopper circled closer. No augs, wrong helicopter, radio silence. But they used ICAP issue and doctrines. He breathed out, listened to the whispers gibber their incoherent bloodlust, then pulled the trigger. He fired the second burst a quarter-second later, just to the left of the first. As the glass canopy cracked, the pilot jinked, putting his center of mass right in line with the second volley. The pilot twitched and jittered, and the chopper dropped into a death-spiral.
Matt heard the impact before he reached the ground, skinning his hands on the rough bark. Monica still sat in the truck, upright and rigid, Ted on her lap. Matt got in and wrinkled his nose at the smell, impossibly even worse than before.
"Ted piddled," Monica said, her voice cracking with stress.
"It's okay. We're clear." He turned the key. The engine struggled for a moment before springing to life. "It's too much to hope that Aaron won’t report his truck missing, so we'll need another car." The smell hit him anew. "And some fresh clothes."
"Where are we going?"
He popped open the glove box and pulled out Aaron Walker's wallet. There were two credit cards they couldn't use, but Matt stuffed the $87 in cash into his pocket. He hit the gas, drove through a creek bed, and just managed to climb the shallow gulley on the other side. "North. Somewhere they won't think to look."
* * *
The mountainous back roads of Tennessee made it easy to hide, even in a truck. Asphalt roads cut through winding forests broken up by quaint, half-dead coal towns that had run dry a century ago. Matt scanned the neighborhood as they drove through one of many suburbs without a city, then grunted in satisfaction at a lemon-yellow colonial with green trim. They ditched the truck next to a half-dozen decaying vehicles behind an abandoned rail yard, tossed the license plates into the creek, then walked back through the woods into town.
Matt felt a twinge of guilt when he stole a pair of boots and a long overcoat off of a porch, but it didn't stop him. Satisfied that his bloody clothes were well-hidden, he went into Wal-Mart to buy them new ones.
He wanted to replace the boots and coat, but didn't have enough cash. At the last second he grabbed bottled water, a ten-pound bag of dog food, and blonde hair dye. After tax, he had just over two dollars. He tossed their old clothes in the dumpster behind the store while Monica changed, shivering as she scrubbed off filth with the water. The yellow maternity shirt hung a little big on her, but it worked.
He sniffed. "We don't smell good, but it's better." He leaned over and let Ted lick his nose. "You stink." Ted gave a happy chuff and wagged his tail.
They walked through town hand in hand, Ted at their heels, a happy couple and their dog out for a morning stroll. Drivers waved as they drove by, and they waved back. They loitered for a moment as a red Ford pickup passed, then ducked down the driveway of a white split-level. They approached the house from behind, creeping into a well-shaded back yard through the gate in the fence. Perfect. Nobody could see them from here, unless they climbed a tree.
He jiggled the handle on the back door. Loose, it rattled but the lock held firm. He took one step back, then kicked. The frame shattered around the deadbolt and the door banged open. Plastic covered the furniture, and the house smelled of dried rose petals and dust. Matt cleared the house, then grabbed two bowls to feed and water Ted.
He surveyed the half-dead street from the shadows of the living room. "I'll check our options while you dye your hair. Don't turn on any lights."
Monica kissed his cheek and swatted his butt on the way past. "Sure."
He heard the shower start as he opened the door to the garage. Dust motes scattered in the sunlight through the scratched Plexiglas windows of the overhead door. As neat and as packed up as the rest of the house, the garage was spotless—every tool had a place, hung on the wall or tucked into a drawer in one of the several tool boxes surrounding the tarp-covered car that dominated the center of the room. Matt removed the cinder blocks from the blue tarp and folded the cover back. He let out a low whistle at the gold-tone 1954 Oldsmobile F-88 convertible, with whitewall tires and cream leather seats.
He popped the hood, examined the engine, then looked around for the keys. He found them hanging on the wall next to the garage door clicker, put them in the ignition, and fired it up. The motor purred without so much as a tick, and the gauges all worked. It even had a quarter tank of gas. He turned it off, got out, and rummaged through the tool boxes. He found a tire iron and a jack, which he put into the trunk, and left the rest in place.
A shadow crossed his vision so he turned toward the door and almost didn't recognize his wife. Monica had cut her platinum blonde hair short, in what he'd have called a dyke cut back in high school. In the yellow shirt she looked so . . . bright wasn't the right word. Ephemeral. Like a fairy or an elf. "Wow."
"Wow, yourself," she smiled. "That's some car." She hopped down the single step and kissed him on the lips. "Do you like it?"
He shrugged, and wished he could withdraw it when she scowled. "You're beautiful. It's just different is all."
"It's supposed to be. We're in disguise, remember?" She kissed him again.
This isn't a game, he thought.
"So this is our getaway?" She ran her hand down the door and peered at the console. "We could do worse."
"Yep."
"How'd you know it was here?" she asked.
"I didn't. Saw the unmowed lawn and the pile of newspapers on the front porch when we drove by. Figured someone was on vacation, and it'd give us a chance to get cleaned up. I didn't figure they'd leave a car. That was a bonus."
"Well, you did good." She held out a child's Crayon drawing of an older couple. The purple chicken scratch at the bottom read, "See you springtime bam and poppop."
"Snowbirds. Probably won't even miss it until spring."
"Good. I need—"
"There's a lockbox in the bedroom closet. Think you can open it?"
He looked around at the toolboxes. "Probably. But let me shower first."
She bit his shoulder, a little too hard. "Want company?"
He grinned. "Of course, but we'd best not. What if someone came in, or Ted started barking?"
She pouted. "Oh, poop."
"Yep."
* * *
They pulled out of the garage with two thousand dollars in cash stuffed into a stolen purse. Matt vowed to pay "bam and poppop" back when this whole thing ended. If we live through it. He tried not to look at Monica as he shoved the thought away—he could psychologically handle his own life in danger, but the moment he dwelled on Monica he froze up. He made a left toward the highway and waved at a couple walking a floppy-eared Doberman.
Monica spoke through her smile. "What if they report us?"
Matt dropped his hand as they passed. "If they know the car, the wave makes us look less suspicious. People tend to write off the friendly. But yeah, we'll ditch it for something less conspicuous when we can."
They filled up the car at the next town, shadowing the highway on back roads, a happy couple making one last drive in the classic car before winter forced it off the road. Monica made small talk with the old gentleman who walked over to admire their ride, and Matt admired how well she lied even as it stabbed at his heart. As they crossed the Kentucky border, Monica rubbed his thigh over the top of Ted, who had dropped from exhaustion after hours of ecstatic overstimulation with his head in the wind.
"You sure about this?"
"You trust him." He kept his eyes on the road. "And I trust him to keep you safe."
"But—"
He put his hand over hers and squeezed. "Stop it, Mon. You were in pain, you got drunk, he got drunk. What happened, happened. I can't forgive you without forgiving him. What's important is that he loves you, and that love will keep you safe while I deal with this. Ancient history is ancient history. And besides, he's not exactly on the dating scene anymore."
She pulled her hand out of his grip, then set it on top of his. "But you haven't talked to him in eight years. Not since . . . ."
Not since you went to him for solace after your first miscarriage.
"Are you sure he'll even talk to us?"
Matt tried not to snarl. "He's going to cooperate, or I'm going to tear off his arm and beat him to death with it."
She squeezed his hand again. "I don't know that this is a good idea."
He sighed. "I can trust you, right?"
"Of course," she said, without the slightest hesitation.
"Then it's a good idea. Nobody would ever imagine I'd leave you with him on purpose."
* * *
St. Martin's website put their Mass schedule at eight and eleven. Matt pulled into the half-full parking lot at eleven forty-five, as parishioners trickled out under the sound of Father Rees's final prayer. The Baptist haven of Franklin, Kentucky, compared with Damascus as a hotbed of ardent Catholicism, and the sparse attendance played that out.
A gaggle of white-clad altar boys went from solemn to roughhousing the moment they left the church, punching and hollering as they looped around toward the side entrance. A chubby woman carrying a red Bible the size of Texas came next, then another boy with a brass candelabra-thingy. Father Rees came last. Jason looked good—thirty years old, with black hair buzzed close to his head to almost hide male-pattern baldness, a healthy, tan complexion and intense, steel-gray eyes. He smiled and waved as his flock dispersed.
Matt stepped in his path, hand extended. "Father."
The priest's genuine smile vanished, replaced with a car salesman's. "Matt!" He shook, squeezing too hard. "Long time, man!" He pumped his arm up and down, placing his left hand atop theirs as his eyes quivered in uncertain fear. "What brings you to Franklin?"
Matt didn't bother with the finger-crushing contest—he had less than nothing to prove about his superhuman physical prowess. He used the grip to turn Jason to his left, where Monica leaned against the brick facade, her cross outside her shirt. One look at her worried face and his cracked to near-panic.
"Can we talk?" Matt asked. "Now?"
"I have an appoin—"
"Cancel it. This is important."
As Rees turned to the Bible-woman his voice shook. "Mary, please give Mr. Elliott my apologies. See if he can reschedule for tomorrow or Tuesday."
"Yes, father," she said, and scurried off, glancing back over her shoulder with a worried frown.
Matt watched her go, then turned to Rees. "Thank you. Got somewhere private?"
He pursed his lips. "How about a diner?"
Matt shook his head. "Something . . . privater." As panic gripped Rees's face, Matt put his hand on his shoulder. "I'm not going to hurt you, father." No matter how much he wanted to.
Rees jerked his head toward the church. "Follow me. There's a Bible study in the Rectory at noon, but I've got an office in the back."
Matt followed him through the door into the church proper. The whispers crushed him, scoured his bones, burned his mind to ash. He gritted his teeth against the onslaught and fell to one knee. The odd symbol throbbed in his vision, the sinuous curves writhing in gore, the bisected circle dripping with gobbets of bloody flesh. He gasped as he fell forward, and the image—and the whispers—vanished. He caught himself inches from the floor. The carpet smelled of Febreeze and burnt matches. He let Jason help him up.
"Are you alright?" the priest asked. "That was a heck of a trip."
Matt frowned, and rejected telling the truth even as the thought sprang to his mind. "I'm fine. Stubbed my toe is all." These whispers had been different. Always on the verge of intelligible, they had had a consistent feel to them, an urgent need for carnage and death. These were anguished, angry . . . and impotent—the rage of a spoiled child denied his favorite toy.
"You sure?"
Matt looked around the church, a modern monstrosity bearing not the slightest resemblance to the dark, gothic, stained-glass festooned edifices you see in the movies. Instead, tall windows looked out into the parking lot on one side, and the Save-A-Lot on the other. The walls, a bland cream that reminded him of a Wal-Mart bathroom, blended with the drab, cushioned pews arranged in a U-shape around the altar. The marble slab stood atop a few short steps, and behind it hung a cross—far from the gory crucifix TV had led him to expect, the cherry-stained mahogany looked almost sterile. "Yeah. I'm good."
Jason—Father Rees—led him past the altar, through a cheap, pre-fab door into an office not much bigger than the Ikea desk crammed into it. Jason offered Matt a chair, sat down, opened a drawer, and pulled out a bottle of scotch and two glasses. He put them both on the desk and hesitated when Matt shook his head. He set the bottle to the side and sat back.
His tan hid the bags under his eyes, but not quite enough. His skin, healthy at first glance, pulled too tight against his face, and his nervous, bloodshot gaze flickered more than once to the bottle as they sat in uncomfortable silence. Hair of the dog, Jason?
Matt realized two things: One, that even with no other options, this might be a mistake. Two, that he'd lied to Monica and to himself about forgiveness. Fair or not, he could forgive her for sleeping with his best friend, but couldn't forgive his best friend for fucking his wife. Would never forgive him. Ever.
At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to dismember Father Rees with his bare hands. But that made him the perfect person to turn to. Matt smothered hatred with duty and spoke. "Has anyone from back home moved to Franklin?"
Jason furrowed his brow. "You mean recently? Um, Mrs. Kensington—"
"—is in her nineties and senile. Anyone who'd know Mon or me."
Rees looked at the ceiling, eyes wandering over the featureless off-white expanse before settling on the portrait on the wall of Jesus with a lamb. "No. Don't think so. Not much of anybody moves to Franklin these days. What's this about?"
"I need you to take in Monica for a while."
Jason choked on nothing. "Excuse me?"
Matt looked into those same steel-gray eyes that he'd dreamed of strangling the life out of countless times and tried to find his childhood friend. His mind smothered any pleasant memory with the lying, opportunistic traitor he'd wanted to kill for the better part of a decade. He expected the whispers to egg him on, but they remained silent. Maybe this hatred didn't need egging. "You heard me. I want Monica to stay in Franklin for a while, and I want you to look after her."
"Can I ask why?"
Matt ran his tongue over his teeth. "You need to know why, so you don't do something stupid. She's pregnant, and worried to death about it, and I need to go out of town for a bit. And someone's trying to kill us."
Rees froze. "Pardon?"
Matt told him everything he knew—about Dawkins, Lake Kivu, the hit squads sent after them the night before, even the bonk-guns.
"So we came here."
"Why?"
"Because they aren't going to stop trying to kill us, and anyone who knows me knows that I'd never leave my wife with you, not for one goddamned second. It wouldn't occur to Momma or her momma or Justin or anyone else to even consider it, if ICAP goes asking where we might have gone."
"I still talk to Justin sometimes—"
"Don't care. Just don't tell him she's here and don't invite him up. And if she needs to go to the hospital, she needs another name. Better, she needs another name for around town." He cut off Jason's question before he had a chance to ask it. "I hope no more than a few weeks, and we'll get out of your hair."
Jason sighed. We have a halfway house—
Matt slammed his hand down onto the desk, careful not to break it. "No halfway house. She needs to stay away from junkies." He ignored Rees's startled look, picked up the scotch, and set it between them. "And no booze." Bile rose in his throat as he admitted her weakness to the man who took advantage of it. "It's been a hard few years. For her. She got into some things she shouldn't have, alcohol, more than that, but she's been clean a while, and she needs to stay that way." For her. For the baby.
"Where am I supposed—"
Matt cut him off with an upraised hand. "Make up a story, make up a name, and find her a place local, somewhere that takes dogs. Just leave back home, White Spruce, and anyone we know out of it. And don't you dare drink in front of her. She doesn't get a drop, not even at service."
I'm so sorry—
Matt snarled. "Don't. You try to apologize, and I'm likely to get violent. We're here because you're good cover. We're here because you love her, and you're going to act out of that love and shelter her until her husband returns."
Jason said nothing for a long moment, then nodded. "Yeah. I will." Time stretched as the silence grew between them. "So, what now?"
"For me? It's better you don't know."
* * *
As Matt left the church, the whispers gibbered in murderous relief. He let their undirected, primeval hatred skitter across his mind, then gasped as they entwined with his own. He stumbled to one knee and stayed there, eyes closed, peeling away tendrils of inhuman monstrosity until only his remained. He shuddered, took a breath, and stood.
He approached the Oldsmobile on wobbly knees and found Monica dozing in the back. Ted stared at him from the driver's seat, tail a whirlwind of berserk, undirected love and loyalty. He took a deep breath, whole again, and grabbed the handle. She opened her eyes as he got in, and sat up when he closed the door.
"He wouldn't do it, would he?"
Matt didn't look at her. "He said yes. You'll be staying here a while, until I can figure out what's going on, get ICAP to back off." Or something.
"What if they don't?"
Then I kill everyone I have to until you're safe. "They will."
She reached forward to scratch Ted's nose and rolled her eyes. "Baby, you just killed twenty people they sent to murder us. And 'they' are a multinational organization that kills superhuman monsters all over the world with basically no jurisdictional boundaries. What could you possibly do to get them to back off?"
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window. "I'm not sure. But I think I need to talk to Jeff."
"Can you trust him?"
A vision swam in front of his closed eyes. Monica, crying over a coffin draped with an American flag, Jeff behind her, face solemn for the cameras. As he turns toward the car, he raises a hand to cover a lopsided smirk. Unsure where the vision fell between premonition and imagination, he shook it off and turned to look at her.
"I have no idea. He's never done me wrong that I know of, and he doesn't tell me everything, but he tells me he doesn't tell me everything . . . ." He picked up her hand and kissed it. "And I don't tell you everything, either. It's the nature of the beast."
"That don't answer the question, baby. Do you trust him?"
Matt ran his fingers over hers, conscious of Jason watching them from the doorway to the church. "Six months ago? Hell, yeah. Yesterday, maybe. But not today. The order might not have come from him, but there's a good enough chance it did. And even if it didn't, if he's given a choice between him and me, I don't think loyalty would tie him down too hard."
"What about your team?"
He shrugged.
"What does that mean?"
He shrugged again. "I don't know, babe. I know Akash has my back, but I'd have bet on Conor, too, right up until I had to kill him. Sakura's all business, but she's insightful and doesn't trust Jeff or Brian, and Garrett . . . . We work well together, but I don't think he likes me much."
"What if you told them the truth? Showed them the injector-guns?"
"Yeah. Maybe." He nodded, more for her benefit than his. "I think so."
"Then trust your gut. Call them."