Brody stood on the corner outside the YMCA, having watched the traffic lights go through ten revolutions. He shifted Alton’s ordi under his other arm and checked his phone for the time. Thorp was fifteen minutes late.
Across the black asphalt that looked oiled in its reflectivity, the first car in some time approached. Brody identified it as the Fairlane by the shape of the headlights. He stepped onto the curb. As it pulled up, Brody heard the car struggling, the supple rumble of the long-in-the-tooth engine now issuing a shrill whine.
Brody opened the door. “Everything all right? And why is the car making that sound?”
“I know who did it.” Thorp made eye contact with Brody. “I know who got Nectar.”
“All right. One thing at a time. Hop out. Let me drive.”
Thorp and Brody orbited around the car to switch sides, then set off.
“What do you mean?”
“I hacked the Probitas website and found that Hark Telecom is their leading client. The letter sent to Nectar had been requested by Hubert Ward, the head of R&D at Hark. She was onto something, the whole bit about Elizabeth Lake being murdered. Her husband was trying to sue Hark for stealing his ideas. And it just so happens that Alton drives four hundred miles and kills her of all people? It’s not solid proof or anything, because as Mateusz said, she and Abby had protested at a lot of different places over the years and … and with Alton, who knows if that’s why he did it. Hey. What’s with the face?”
With both hands gripping the wheel, Brody said, “I pretty much came to the same conclusion. Alton Noel installed electronics on base while stationed in Malaysia. Electronics from Hark Telecom.”
When the car sounded like it might call it quits, Brody halted his story. He pulled over to let the Fairlane work out whatever bout of discomfort it was suffering and pleaded with it to delay its death rattle until they at least got out of the city. It agreed, the engine returning to a normal idle. After a couple of backfires as loud as gunshots, they continued.
“And that’s not all. The guy was in one hell of a hard place. He was wracked with guilt over what he’d done.” Brody glanced at Thorp, whose expression had darkened faintly. He ground his teeth and scrambled for a way to move the subject along quickly. “But what we have here is proof that he was a decent person that didn’t want to murder those people but he had been put up to it.”
“He could’ve just been saying that stuff for the benefit of the camera,” Thorp pointed out.
“No one’s that good of an actor,” Brody said. He highlighted the videos from top to bottom with one pass of his finger and copied them to the e-mail he was preparing. “Not only does he say it was Hark that had him install the base’s tech that made everyone sick, but when he got back stateside, he was visited by someone who carried a lot of knives, cautioning him to be available on ten-twenty. Said he shoved the guy down, demanded his name.”
“Titian Shandorf?” Thorp asked.
“Called himself Uncle Titian.”
Thorp blew all the air from his lungs. “Christ.” And, “It’s green.”
Brody handed the ordi over to Thorp.
He took it, peered into the monitor to see the twodimensional version of Alton’s video freeze-framed. “What’s ten-twenty?”
“The twentieth of October.”
“Shit.” Again, he exhaled in a quick puff. “Well, that clinches it, then, right? If some guy came to him and said something about ten-twenty and that was the date he killed those people—and Elizabeth Lake, the wife of Hark’s enemy. He must’ve been put up to it. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“It does to you and me, but we really need some good honest facts, genuinely solid evidence. We can’t take what we got so far to the cops and expect them to do anything other than point us in the direction of the bughouse. We’ve got to link Hark and Titian.”
They turned onto the interstate. Morning commuters surrounded them on all sides, and despite Brody trying to dodge around them before the inevitable jam was encountered, they weren’t so lucky. Thankfully, the accident that had occurred up ahead was quickly shuffled to the shoulder, and shortly after the blinking cones and the cops in their reflective vests were out of the way, traffic continued unabated.
While passing the wreck and the crowd of officers, Brody noticed Thorp sink down in his seat. He was about to ask what was the matter, then pieced it together on his own. Through gritted teeth, Brody gave his opinion on Thorp’s failure to get rid of Spanky.
Thorp apologized profusely, quietly, and when they got beyond the flashing red and blue lights, he sat up in his seat and checked his mirror. The cops were preoccupied with the wreck, and besides, out of all the cars on the highway, how could they possibly know one of them had a dead body in the trunk? This was Chicago. There were probably a few cars out this morning with bodies in the trunk.
Thorp broke his stare with what was going on behind them and asked, “Anything on Nectar?”
“She was in the first video,” Brody said.
“How’d she look?”
“Good. Pretty.” He added, “She got tall.”
Thorp nudged a pocket of snow in the plastic wrap to the edge. It scattered away alongside the windows as a flashing, pitched handful of glittering white. “Yeah, she always was quite the beanpole, wasn’t she?” He started to say something more, but his voice tapered off into a squeak.
Before Brody could scold him about what tense he should be using when talking about his missing sister, Thorp grabbed his Gizumoshingu from the floorboard and said, “Would you mind some music? I could use the distraction.”
“Go for it.”
Thorp started a playlist and muttered the lyrics.
Brody watched the road ahead as the jagged city shapes fell away in favor of storage units, sports bars with dead signs, boat and RV outlets, and hunting supply shops. The emporiums people who lived out in the sticks came in for but far enough from the urban fringe that they’d never have to set foot in the city proper.
The streetlights became less frequent, just a dotted line spaced far enough apart that the circles they painted on the asphalt barely touched the edges. He yawned, watched as one of the farthest lanes melded in with the others. The traffic thinned out to a trickle, and before long they were alone on an empty two-lane road once more.
Snowflakes began charging the shine of the Fairlane’s headlights in an antagonistic flood. Brody was suddenly very glad Thorp had been so resourceful with the plastic wrap and tape. Haloing everything that dared to glow, Brody noticed, was the same constant flow of passing flakes. For a splintered fragment of time, he dreamt of sandstorms.
“This takes me back,” Thorp said after “Commando” had come around for the third time on the shuffled playlist.
Brody invited conversation to keep himself awake, even if it meant talking about the old days. He said, “Oh yeah?” and forced his orange eyes open as far as they’d go. “Listen, you might have to drive in a minute because I think I’m just about out on a—”
00:00:59.
“—charge.”
They pulled over, switched places. Back on the passenger side, Brody hoped that the stop had sidelined Thorp’s desire to talk more about the past, but it wasn’t so. Thorp had barely dropped the car into drive before he started again.
Thorp said, “Do you remember when we did Operation Ceramic Groom?”
The three words stirred their hearer. “Sure, the largest hospital in Cairo taken over by revolutionaries, a suicide bomber standing watch in the children’s burn unit wing while another sat beside an innocent woman who was being kept alive by machines. Good times.”
It took a lot to slather some sarcasm across the recollections of that particular day. He now knew what Thorp meant, though. Hearing “Commando” at top volume, sitting strapped into a seat. The Darter passing over the city, eating up the distance from the base to the hospital in seconds—seconds Brody begged to double, triple. Setting down on the hospital helipad, rushing because never would they think to post a man on the roof—they were all on the ground floor, watching the lobby, using the nurses’ kiosk as a makeshift foxhole.
Thorp jolted Brody from the memory by speaking over the song. “It worked.”
“Yeah,” Brody admitted. “They never saw us coming.” He got it. He glanced at Thorp, who raised his eyebrows.
“We have an idea that Titian is working for Hark, but like you said, we need hard evidence. We know they’re only watching the bottom floors closely. It’s an idea. And there are no bad ideas in the planning phase when thinking about stopping the bad guys.”
“True,” Brody said, “but we’re not planning anything.”
“I’m just spitballing here.”
“You’re talking about hijacking,” Brody said, screwing the lid on the lens charger and withdrawing the sonar, “because there sure as hell ain’t any way we’re going to get a pilot to take us to the Hark Telecom roof voluntarily. And if you remember, a whole lot of what the bad guys did involved schemes very similar to that one.”
Thorp shrugged, broke eye contact with the road long enough to run his finger over the touch pad to find the next song that suited his mood. “All I’m saying is that you can’t deny the fact it worked. We’ll do what you think is best, but that’s all I’m saying. Direct access to whatever Hubert Ward has on his hard drive might be useful and—”
Brody glanced at Thorp and noticed he was looking ahead about half as often as in the rearview mirror. Some more textures bled into Thorp’s face, and Brody could detect that he was squinting. “What’s going on?” he asked over the wind roaring through the car.
Thorp didn’t respond.
Brody turned around in the passenger seat and looked, even though there was little to spy because the rear windscreen was still intact. He listened instead. He could hear the engine noises, the Fairlane’s wheels crushing snow under its tires, but beyond that … the sound of another engine, a bigger one. He spun around to face the car’s touch screen. “The tracker. We never turned it off.”
Thorp freed one hand from the wheel to swipe through the car’s menu, found the tracker option, and turned it off.
“What a relief,” Brody scoffed. “He’ll never find us now.”
Thorp ignored the remark and removed the Franklin-Johann from Brody’s coat pocket. He attempted to eject the magazine to check it, even going so far as to thumb the button three and four times in rapid succession. But Brody kept the gun unloaded. Eyes on the road, gun, road. “I’m going to need bullets, man.”
“Give me a second.” Brody took out the magazine and handed it over.
In a daring move, Thorp took both hands from the wheel and reloaded the gun with a clatter. He engaged the safety and set it on the seat between them but kept a hand upon it.
Twisting in his seat, Brody listened to their pursuer’s engine get louder and louder, the vehicle giving all it had to eat up the distance between them.
“Can’t this piece of shit go any faster?” Thorp shouted, giving the wheel a series of openhanded strikes.
In a moment, the Zäh punched through the sheet of falling snow and was on them, bumpers colliding. The closely trailing vehicle eased off a few yards and then lurched forward again, the bumpers hitting a second time with a shriek of buckling metal.
The Fairlane was rushed forward, the front wheels momentarily losing traction. A tiny bark of friction sounded when the Fairlane found bare asphalt beneath the snow and dug at it. The other side was still in the slick stuff, and the steering wheel was violently kicked against Thorp’s hands.
Brody shouted, “Shoot at him or something!”
Thorp shoved the handgun at him. “I’m trying to keep us on the road. You shoot.”
Three reports came just as the last word left his lips, the glass collapsing into the car into the backseat. Through the new opening, Brody watched in horror as the sonar painted the Zäh into the diorama. It was rudimentary in shape, as blocky as a bad special effect, but altogether terrifying knowing who was driving. Brody was frozen this way, literally caught in the headlights he couldn’t actually see.
When the bumpers collided again, Thorp snatched the gun from Brody, rolled down the side window, and fired backwards, gouging out one of the Zäh’s headlights.
The plastic wrap mask that the Fairlane wore gave way without warning. It became a twisting, shining braid and detached, soaring into the snowstorm’s winds. Wind and ice kicked freely into the car once more. Brody raised a hand to divert some of its bites, but it did little good. He turned his face away from it, the sonar’s ping finding its way into the Zäh, since one of the windows was being rolled down. In polygon, he saw Seb reloading his weapon with one hand on the wheel.
“Now,” Brody urged.
Thorp fired and the Zäh reacted at once: the front end wiggled.
Seb angled his body up into the open window. Another volley of shots into the Fairlane.
There was a solid punch against Brody’s spine, a slug striking his seat. He touched his back and felt no blood, no warm ache. But now, added to the snow blowing freely and tearing about within the car, came the toxic stench of melting foam.
Thorp glanced around. “There’s a curve coming up. I’ve got to slow down.” Again, he tried giving the gun to Brody. When he didn’t take it, Thorp merely let it drop, his hand racing back to the wheel.
The crook in the road came up, and Thorp tapped the brake. The move had been miscalculated and they lost too much speed, nearly coming to a full halt in the outermost portion of the curve.
Seb barreled up on them. All Brody saw was the vehicle’s grille slam into them.
The impact sent the Fairlane into a spin. They were on the road for a few more seconds before flying through the ditch to the other side. By momentum alone, the Fairlane crossed the field, easing into a slow crawl—the engine clunking and wheezing. Thorp stomped the gas, but the car didn’t kick ahead along the snow-covered dirt. The engine didn’t respond.
Brody heard the click of the dashboard monitor dying, that muffled pop akin to a lightbulb filament throwing in the towel, as well as the series of small clinks as the instrument panel’s needles dropped back to zero.
And lastly, a metallic cough sputtered and spat steam, belching up and around the lip of the hood—the Fairlane’s final white flag.