Abbey awoke, her brain lost in a fog. Her eyes blinked open, but nothing came into focus, and the images around her rippled like ocean waves in her head. A powerful smell filled her nose. Smoke. Chemicals. Burnt things. She felt dirty, as if a film of dust had caked onto her skin. Her burgundy hair fell in limp strands across her face. When she went to brush it away, she found that she couldn’t move her arms. They were tied uncomfortably behind her in the small of her back, her wrists taped together. In panic, she tried to stand up, but she realized that her ankles had been bound together, too. She was seated, her back against some kind of stone wall, but she couldn’t move.
When she tried to cry out—Help me!—she found a gag filling her mouth, a strip of cloth tied around her head to hold it in place. She couldn’t say a word. All she could do was grunt and moan from the depths of her throat. She was a prisoner.
The world finally came into focus. What she saw was a holocaust. She’d been placed among the black-scorched walls of a destroyed house. One brick wall leaned inward, ready to fall. There was no roof over her head, just clouds and sky and the skeleton of a tree looming above the house like a bare cross. Charred debris littered the floor, which was a bed of wet gray ash. Roof shingles. Sheetrock. Broken pipes. Glass that had become lava. Melted silverware, melted plastic. Through the rectangular gap that had once been a doorway, she could see outside to the ruins of a street, where the hulking shells of cars still lingered where their owners had abandoned them as they ran.
The fire.
She was in the heart of the fire. She’d been here many times before, wandering through the moonscape of destruction.
But why?
Then she understood. A shadow filled the doorway, and in the dim light, she recognized her husband. Her momentary relief evaporated when she saw his face, which had a flat cruelty she’d never seen in him before. It was so obvious to her now, how she’d been fooled, how she’d walked into his trap months ago.
“You’re up,” Garrett said, watching her from the doorway. “I was thinking it would be easier if you were still unconscious.”
Abbey squirmed, wanting to get up and go after him, wanting to rip off his limbs, wanting to pick up one of the chunks of metal or stone from the floor and beat his head with it. But she couldn’t move.
He came forward, and she noticed a gun shoved into his belt. Her gun. He reached to a back pocket and pulled out a knife, which made her flinch. She tried to squirm away, but he caught her and sliced through the tape that held her wrists together. There was some kind of cloth below it, like a shirt. At first, she wondered why he’d taken care not to abrade her skin, but then she realized the truth, and the truth was worse. He didn’t want any evidence that she’d been bound. When the gun—her gun—blew out the back of her skull, he wanted the death to look like a suicide.
She stretched her fingers; she coaxed life back into her arms. A part of her wanted to grab for the gun, but she didn’t have the strength. Carefully, Garrett cut the knot that held the cloth around her face, and then he eased the gag from her mouth. She had to work the kinks out of her jaw.
Then she screamed.
Garrett just shrugged. “Scream all you want. There’s no one around, Abs.”
She shut her mouth again, saving her breath. Garrett put the knife back in his pocket. He took the gun from his belt and racked the slide, but he didn’t point it at her. Not yet. Instead, he sat down in the ash a few feet away, his legs pulled up, his arms around his knees. His lips puckered with a kind of hollow regret.
“I’m sorry, you know. That doesn’t mean anything, but I’m sorry it’s come to this. I never thought it would, but I guess I was naive.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah. I deserve that.”
Abbey shook her head. Every twist of her muscles brought pain. Her brain still felt as if she were crawling through gelatin. It was the aftermath of whatever drug he’d given her. She tried to put together the puzzle, but she didn’t have all of the pieces. Even so, she guessed the biggest one. The one that started everything.
“You have the Files,” Abbey said.
“Sure. The laptop is in the car. I’ve had it in a storage locker for months. I tried to sell it overnight, but your boyfriend fucked it up. That’s okay. Once I get overseas, I’ll find lots of buyers.”
Her boyfriend. Abbey knew he meant Jason. The thought of him, the realization that he was still out there, gave her a glimmer of hope, like the sun creeping over the morning horizon. But they were in the middle of nowhere, and in minutes, she’d be dead. That was the reality. As fast as the sun rose in her mind, it disappeared into black clouds.
“What about Vix?” Abbey asked. “How did she fit into this?”
“She was a useful source of information,” Garrett said. “I seduced her at the AI conference. Not the other way around. She was alone, and she needed someone to trust, and there I was.”
“Like me,” Abbey said bitterly.
“Yeah. Like you. I was gathering information for Treadstone, and Vix looked like someone who could help me crack the code of what was really going on at Jumpp. I wanted her brain, and her body was a bonus. She went to DicTrace because we both figured there had to be third-party apps involved. I’d already guessed that when I saw the anomalies at mygirlnextdoor. But after she went there, Vix was the one who figured out how it all worked, that it was way more than data hacking. Her father had built an AI engine to extract secrets out of the data—shit that no human being would ever have found. Shit that was valuable. That was when I began to think about my options.”
“You mean you thought about getting the Files for yourself,” Abbey said.
“Exactly. That’s why I never told Treadstone who Vix was or what this was all about. This was my golden ticket, you know? Better than an IPO.”
“Except Vix figured it out.”
“She did. She was smart. She was able to guess her father’s back door to gain access to the hidden code at Jumpp, and she was able to get hold of the AI software. After that, the first thing she did was run me through the Files. That was when she realized I was the one who’d set up her father.”
“You. Not Treadstone.”
“Yeah, me. I wanted Mr. Yuan out of the way. I wanted his job. So I leaked it. I knew what the Chinese would do. But Vix figured it out. She kept sending me threats after that. But all the time she was watching me—”
“You were watching her.”
“Right. I needed to get the AI engine away from her. So I made her believe the Chinese were closing in, that they knew who she was. With that kind of pressure, I figured she would try to run, and she did. She approached Callie Faith about helping her, and I was watching. Callie set her up here. Right here. In this house.”
Abbey closed her eyes. “You killed her. You started the fire.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ, Garrett. Did you know it would spread? Tell me it was an accident.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, Abbey.”
“You knew it was a windy day. You knew the hills were tinder-dry.”
“Sure, I knew.”
“You’re a fucking monster.”
Garrett rubbed his beard. Then he played with the gun in his hands. “Well, you wanted a conspiracy for your book, Abbey. You got it. One house burns down with somebody in it, the police are going to know something’s wrong. A whole town burns down, and everybody thinks it’s an accident. Downed power lines. A careless camper who didn’t put out his fire. The only people who don’t believe it are conspiracy nuts like your buddy Jerry. Nobody listens to people like that.”
“Except me,” Abbey said.
Garrett sighed. “Except you. Days after the fire, it looked like everything was fine. Vix was one of a hundred people who were unlucky enough to get caught by the blaze. The media was blaming the usual suspects. But no one was talking about murder. No one was talking about this house or a body that couldn’t be identified. And then I read that you’d decided to write a book about the fire. Abbey Laurent. The queen of conspiracy novelists. You worried me, Abbey. You worried me because you’re good at what you do, and people listen to you.”
“O’Hare,” Abbey murmured. “That wasn’t an accidental meeting between us at the bar. You didn’t just happen to be there.”
“No. Lana found out where you were going to be. She adjusted my travel schedule to route me through Chicago. I found you at the bar. And I’d already done my research. I knew everything about you. So I knew what buttons to push.”
Abbey swore under her breath. She hated that she’d made it so easy for him. Without any doubt or hesitation, she’d let him into her bed and let him into her life. She hadn’t admitted to herself that she was on the rebound from Jason, that she needed to be in love again with someone else, anyone else. And here was this smart young nerd, sweet and innocent, who laughed at her jokes and loved Quebec and had been reading Peter Chancellor books since he was a kid.
All lies.
“You may not believe this,” Garrett went on, “but I really did fall in love with you. At least a little bit. I never intended to take things as far as I did. Getting married, well, I guess I got caught up in it like you did. That wasn’t part of the plan. It just happened.”
“Do you think I believe that?” Abbey asked.
“I’m sure you don’t. And to be honest, I was fucking Lana the whole time, too. She was my partner.”
“Vix. Me. Lana. You’re a real treat, Garrett. Are you going to kill her, too?”
“A loose end is a loose end,” he said with a shrug.
He got to his feet. Abbey shrank into herself, knowing what was coming. They’d reached the end of the line. Her gun. A millisecond of light and pain, followed by nothingness. She’d be the last victim of the fire. She didn’t cry or beg; she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of watching her crumble. With a sharp intake of breath, she turned her fear into anger as he squatted in front of her.
“No one will believe I killed myself,” she said. “Everyone will know it was you.”
“Maybe so. I’m a good liar, but it doesn’t matter. I have enough money to get away, and once I sell the Files, I’ll be able to build a whole new identity in some corner of the world where no one will expect me to be.”
He was inches away from her. That face—it was still a handsome face. The devil was never ugly; he always had charm. She’d stared into that face dozens of times when she made love to him. She wished she could burn those memories out of her head, but she knew that, in a moment, he would do it for her.
“Why don’t you close your eyes?” he said.
“Why don’t you go to hell?” Abbey replied.
Garrett lifted his arm. She watched the barrel of the CZ P-01 take shape like a black hole in front of her eyes. She tried to grab the gun; she tried to deflect it, push him away. But she still had almost no strength in her arms after being bound for hours. His strength forced her hands back, and the gun pushed into the smooth skin of her temple.
More than anything, Abbey wanted to close her eyes, but she didn’t. Not for this man. She would force him to see the light go out of her eyes. His index finger slid down the barrel for the trigger, and all it would take was the tiniest pressure. Squeeze the trigger back, and end her life.
“You won’t feel a thing,” he said.
Abbey finally began to cry. She couldn’t help herself.
But not because she was about to die. In the shadows of the ruined house, she saw a blur of motion, swift and sure, and she knew who it was. The next instant, the gun disappeared from her head, and Garrett’s whole body flew into the air, as if a bolt of lightning had blasted him from the ground.