NINETEEN
• • •
Tiffany awoke in the darkness, her senses immediately alert. She’d arrived home from work feeling tired and sick. The bedroom in her little apartment was not much larger than the bed and dresser to begin with, but the walls seemed to be even closer now. Light from the streetlamps outside seeped past the edges of the shades and cast the room in a drab-gray hue. Shadows loomed but did not move, like phantoms content to just watch, observe, but not yet act on their malevolent intentions.
She’d heard something while she slept. Her subconscious had picked up a creak, a scuffle, a scuttle. Something in the night in her apartment, a misplaced sound that triggered her brain to awaken her. Now, awake and alert, she lay in her bed, covers pulled to her armpits, and listened.
Nothing. All was quiet. Silent. Still. But she had heard something. Unless . . . it was nothing more than an all-too-realistic dream, a sound conjured by her brain, convincing her sleeping mind that it had originated outside in the waking world.
But rarely, in fact, never, had a dream elicited this kind of reaction. This was real. Slowly she reached for her handgun, a Glock 19. She kept it under a pillow positioned next to her on the double bed. It was loaded and ready to go. A single woman living alone could never be too cautious.
Still, no sounds came from the rest of the apartment. The shadows continued to loom and now seemed to encroach upon her, growing larger, drawing closer.
A muted clunk broke the silence, but she quickly determined that it had come from the apartment above her. The clock on her bedside table said it was a little after midnight. Mrs. Bringardner had probably dropped her coffee mug as she fell asleep watching the late news.
Then, from the living room/kitchen area she heard it, the slight scuffle that had no doubt awakened her. Tiffany gripped the Glock with both hands and pointed it at the closed door of her bedroom. If an intruder was out there, he’d be in for quite the surprise if he chose to enter her room.
Suddenly, before she had time to adjust her position or shift her weight, a thud cracked through the silence of the apartment and the bedroom door flew open. A man’s silhouette filled most of the doorway. He was big, broad in the chest and shoulders, and tall.
Instinctively Tiffany squeezed the trigger, and the pop concussion of her handgun sounded just as she saw the muzzle flash of the intruder’s gun. She flinched and, now in a state of all-out panic, fired again and again. The man twisted and nearly fell. Tiffany sat up straight in her bed and squeezed the trigger yet again, aiming wildly this time. The man turned and ran the other way, toward the door of the apartment. She swung her legs from the bed and covered the short distance to the bedroom doorway. But by the time she arrived, the intruder was already gone. The door of the apartment hung wide open.
Shaking uncontrollably and nearly in tears, Tiffany quickly crossed the living area and poked her head out of the apartment. The hallway was clear for the moment. Then, a couple doors down, Mr. Jensen, a widower and World War II veteran, stuck his head out and scanned the hallway.
Tiffany ducked back into her apartment and shut the door. She slid down the wood until she sat on the floor, her knees to her chest. She still held the Glock in her right hand, her finger still on the trigger. There was blood on the floorboards beside her, large droplets the size of quarters. She checked her body —chest, abdomen, arms, legs. It wasn’t her blood. The tears came then, a wave of them, shuddering through her bones like the aftershock of a major earthquake.
In the distance sirens wailed. So much for being invisible.
“I’m sorry.”
A distant voice emerged from the fog that surrounded Jed. He felt as though he’d been partially buried in quicksand and any attempted movement was forestalled by the suction force of the sand.
“I’m sorry, Patrick.”
The voice grew closer, clearer, more familiar. The room lightened as objects began to come into focus. His mind was still a haze, though, a soupy mix of fractured images and sounds and emotion. Gunfire echoed in his ears, as did the voices of those dying, trapped, battered.
A hum was there too —quiet, steady —and whispers of others.
“Patrick, wake up.”
The voice . . . it was clear now. A man’s voice, emotionless, flat, cold. Murphy.
Jed turned his head and found Murphy seated beside him. He opened his mouth to talk, but his lips and tongue didn’t seem to want to cooperate. All that came out was a jumbled mess of sounds.
“Give yourself a moment to fully emerge,” Murphy said. “It’ll only be a few seconds.”
Jed tried to lift his head, but it was too heavy. He moved his fingers, his wrist, his elbow. His movements were clumsy, like those of a drunk trying in vain to prove how sober he really was but only making more and more a fool of himself.
Moments later the fog cleared almost completely. He was in a concrete room, stretched out on a gurney of some sort. His clothes had been removed and he now wore a hospital gown. An IV ran from a bag of clear fluid dangling from a metal pole to the back of his right hand.
He looked at Murphy, wanting answers.
Murphy stood and towered over Jed. “You lied to us, Patrick. Again. You didn’t bring the drive.”
Jed said nothing.
“Where is it?”
Still, Jed remained silent. If they knew Karen had it, they’d go after her. They’d find her. And then . . .
Jed shut his eyes.
Murphy leaned in close, so close Jed could smell the old chewing gum on his breath. “We know where it is. I wanted to give you the opportunity to cooperate, make sure we get it without anyone getting hurt, but since you are so determined to resist us, we’ll have to take it by force. You should have given it to us.” He placed a hand on Jed’s shoulder. “We’re on your side, Patrick. I wish you’d see that. You need to stop fighting us. We have the same enemy; we need to work together.”
Jed had no idea if Murphy was telling the truth about the drive or not, but he certainly wasn’t going to give anything away in case the man was bluffing. Fatigue gradually infiltrated Jed’s mind again as if a heavy fog had moved in off the coast and blocked out the light of the sun. Darkness clouded his vision until he could no longer see but only hear.
“You’re going to sleep now, Patrick.” Murphy’s voice was calm but . . . different. It sounded deeper, more throaty, like gravel in a bucket.
Jed’s mind slowed. He tried to move but couldn’t. Tried to open his eyes, but they were stuck shut.
“When you awaken, you’ll be a new man . . .”