FIFTEEN

•   •   •

Andrew Murphy was comfortably situated behind his desk in the bunker. He’d demanded that he have his own office space for private calls and meetings. The work he did with the CIA was far beyond top secret or need-to-know. Far more important than just lives depending on it. Lives were expendable, commodities to be sacrificed to achieve a greater good. And the greater good was at stake. His work and the work of so many teetered at the edge of the plank. And one man stood on the other end, inching closer, almost within arm’s reach to give just a little shove and send the whole operation into oblivion. Decades of research and trials and accomplishments, years of successful missions and dedicated men’s lives, gone. Wiped out. Exposed and crucified.

He couldn’t let that happen. That’s why he needed Patrick. Sure the guy was unstable; his loyalty had been compromised, his trust undermined, but Andrew held the one card that would win the whole hand. Patrick’s weakness had always been his family —that’s why he’d flunked out as an operative, that’s why he’d proved Nichols wrong and made the man look like a fool.

But Andrew was no fool. He knew how to control people and get what he wanted out of them. And Patrick was quite possibly the only man in America equipped to pull off this next mission. It would be his last; Andrew would see to that.

His mobile vibrated against the desk. It was McGrath back at Langley. Andrew hit the Talk button. “Yeah.”

“The drive’s been located and files decoded.”

“Where?”

“Stockton’s office.”

Andrew cursed and hit the desk. “Who?”

“His daughter.”

“Are you sure?”

“We got her on video coming and going.” There was a brief pause. “She gave the info to someone else.”

“You gonna tell me who?”

“Her supervisor, Jack Calloway.”

“Are you sure she talked?”

“Not 100 percent.”

Andrew ran his hand over his face, then forked his fingers through his hair. His face felt flushed. “Okay, get the drive and any other info the girl has. I want printouts, copies, anything that she made of the files. Then see that she is taken care of. As for Calloway, watch him for a couple days. He does anything suspicious, anything, take him out and get whatever info he has.”

•   •   •

After leaving the filling station, Karen decided to stay on US 30, a much less traveled road than the interstate and one less frequently patrolled by state troopers. As she drove, she barely noticed the world outside the cab of the truck. Her thoughts were not on the fields stretching in every direction, flat as a calm sea all the way to the natural horizon, nor on the cloudless expanse of sky above dotted with birds and scarred with unraveling contrails. She scarcely took note of the occasional farmhouse and barn set back off the road, posing quietly for another postcard moment.

Her thoughts were on Jed and Lilly, where they were, and if they were safe or not. US 30 meandered through rural America all the way to the east coast and cut right through Pennsylvania. At times it was four lanes and moved along swiftly, but then it would narrow to two lanes and be stop-and-go through a town or city.

Karen’s thoughts were also on the thumb drive in her pocket. What information did it contain? How damning was it that men were willing to die and kill for it? Could the exposure of such information truly bring down an entire government?

As before, she felt she needed to get rid of it. She fished it from her pocket and held it in her hand. It would be easy to toss it out the window. It would either be ruined by rain and the eventual snow that would cover it, or some highway hitchhiker would find it lying along the shoulder. He’d try it on some computer only to discover the contents encrypted. He might then turn it in to the police, where it would eventually find its way to the FBI and possibly wind up in the hands of the wrong people.

No, she had to do the right thing. Men died to get Jed the drive. Jed himself had put so much on the line so she would have a chance to get the drive into the hands of the right people. She couldn’t just abandon it now.

She placed the drive on the console between the front seats, then checked the mirrors. At once, her chest tightened and insect legs tickled the back of her neck. A state trooper trailed her, keeping pace about a hundred yards back. Karen checked her speedometer. She wasn’t violating the speed limit. Heat radiated up her neck and into her cheeks. She hadn’t done anything wrong. He had no reason to pull her over. She told herself in her most convincing voice that he was just on patrol, no need to panic. His lights weren’t flashing, so he had no intention of pulling her over. She was going the speed limit, so he had no reason to pass her.

Slowly, though, the patrol car closed the gap until it was just twenty or so feet from her rear bumper, and Karen could make out the markings on the hood. It was a Nebraska state patrol car. And as the car closed the gap between them even more, she could recognize the driver’s face behind his mirrored sunglasses: the trooper from the diner.

What was a Nebraska trooper doing in Indiana? How had he come to be on the exact same road she was? He had to be following her.

She willed herself to relax, but it was useless. Her muscles were as tense as steel cords. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, upper lip, and chin. Her heart hammered under the seat belt.

Then, as if the cop could read her mind and found there her most intense right-now fear, the flashers on the cruiser lit up.

•   •   •

No one ever called him Rhett Earl James. Even when he was a child, most everyone called him Jimmy. His mom had some kind of fascination with Rhett Butler and insisted her firstborn son share the same name. His daddy allowed her that one pleasure but the day Rhett was born declared his son would never be called that hideous name; he would be Jimmy. His father died shortly after that, and two years later his mother remarried a hard man, a violent man, a man who never called Rhett anything other than boy.

Now, everyone who mattered called him Nighthawk.

Out of high school, Jimmy joined the Navy and went on to become a SEAL. There, he trained to become invisible, both at night and in the full light of day. To blend into his surroundings and become one with his environment, to observe with patience, to watch, to learn. And he could move swiftly and silently when the time was right.

Then he was sent to North Africa on a mission to rescue an aid worker abducted by Muslim troublemakers. The mission went south and he returned to the States damaged, both physically and mentally. They told him he had PTSD. They told him he’d never fight again. He was too unstable.

But when the agency found him and recruited him and retrained him, he was once again a protector of the nation he loved. He was once again useful. Civilians —the folk who went about their lives, worked their jobs, loved their families —never knew men like him existed. If average citizens knew the fine line the security of the country rested on, they wouldn’t be so casual about the way they lived. They wouldn’t take their freedom and safety for granted.

It was men like Jimmy who served as the firewall for the rest of the population. They worked behind the scenes, unseen, invisible. It was their job, their duty, to head off threats, to thwart evil plans, to prevent assassinations.

And Jimmy was on one such mission now. He’d been told the target would be at Pier 33 in San Francisco. He had no problem locating him. Despite his official US Parks shirt and hat, the man looked military. The way he moved, the way he held his shoulders, the way he scanned the crowd and buildings. This was a man who’d been trained to survey, to take in his surroundings and quickly assess a situation.

Jimmy’s orders were to not engage the target unless the man broke protocol. He was only to observe and report his observations to the boss. If needed, he was to engage with only enough force to deliver the target to the appropriate location. He was not afraid of a confrontation. He was younger and no doubt quicker than Patrick. He had complete faith that in a hand-to-hand engagement he would be the superior fighter. He’d killed more than a few men with his bare hands.

Jimmy had followed Patrick into Alcatraz and now he stood with the basement door open and stared down into the murky hole. Without wasting any more time, he eased onto the first concrete step, the second, and the third, forcing himself to move his legs, to take each step. When he’d gotten to the sixth, he let the door close above him and allowed the dank crypt to swallow him.

•   •   •

When Jed was a little more than fifty feet from the staircase, the cellar door opened with a low moan, then closed with a soft click. Light footsteps descended the steps.