DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (26 page)

The rain came hard and fast, turning the world the color of cinder. A tethered dinghy bounced in the waves and thumped against the dock. The lake turned choppy, the water gray and frothy in the downpour. The trees shook, their branches silver, beads of rain slicing through the thick boughs. The trees surrounded the large Adirondack Great Camp, it too colorless in the storm.

The bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.

Brendan stood in the driveway, his jeans and sweatshirt soaked through, looking at the Land Cruiser parked at the end of the driveway in front of the single-bay garage. The garage was built into the ground, part of the basement of the large structure. Alongside the garage door was an entrance, the door white with chipped paint. The iron knob squeaked in his grip; it was open. Brendan slipped inside.

The basement was dark, musty, and smelled of earth. As his eyes adjusted to the weak light coming in through the ground-level windows, he saw bags of potting soil stacked up and other landscaping and gardening equipment. Near the back was a workbench and a wall of tools. An old rotary-dial phone was fastened to the wall. Deeper in, a large object sat covered in a tarpaulin. He lifted the canvas covering and peered underneath. A restored boat; a guide boat, Alexander Heilshorn’s prized possession.

Along the far wall were stairs going up, with boxes stuffed beneath. The place was littered with old chairs, bicycles, shelves with canned food, camping supplies.

Pounding from above. Thuds against the floor that moved quickly from one end of the house to another, like running. It sounded like a child. Brendan looked at the ceiling. The footfalls shook the dust from the underfloor.

He started up the stairs.

The wood groaned softly beneath his weight; one stair creaked louder than others, and he froze halfway up. He waited. He heard the pounding again, reverberations of a child running, back in the other direction. He quickly went up the rest of the steps, while the child was in motion, using the sound to conceal his movement.

He faced the narrow door at the top of the stairs. It was locked.

Made sense, he thought. Keep a small child from wandering downstairs. He paused, listening to the noise of the rain outside, the distant banging of the dinghy against the dock. As he considered his course of action, he heard a different sound.

The latch of the door at the garage entrance. Someone was coming in behind him from the outside.

He stood still, his soaked clothes dripping, wetting the strip of worn carpet that ran down the flight of stairs. He felt the rain in his hair trickle down the sides of his face. He kept his breathing shallow, straining to hear more.

He thought he detected the scrape of a foot. As he hesitated and listened, the pounding suddenly resumed as the child in the house ran back across the floor again, covering the whole breadth of it.
Thump thump thump thump thump
. The sound sinking down towards the other end of the building.

The stairs rose into an alcove where various bags and jackets hung from pegs in the wall. Where he stood, on the second step from the top, he was hidden from below. If he took just one step down, his feet would be visible.

He was trapped in between. Door locked to the house, someone in the basement.

Another rumble of thunder. The deep bass of it, like a stone rolling across a hard floor in heaven. There was no turning back.

Brendan launched himself at the door, throwing his shoulder into it, giving it every ounce of strength he had. But there was no leverage. He heard a splintery crack of wood and the door seemed to give way some but it didn’t open. His stomach went oily. His heart seemed to stop beating for a moment. A flare of heat around his ears, in his armpits, his groin. His whole body pulsed with the beating of his heart, his skin tingled with nerves and blood.

From below him came the distinct sounds of shoes on concrete, a figure running across the space towards the stairs.

He threw himself at the door again; his shoulder, the palm of his hand, even the side of his skull thwacked into the wood. There was a crunching sound, and a groaning of metal as the latch bent slightly and sheared away from the wood casing and the door exploded open and Brendan tumbled through.

He was on his hands and knees. A linoleum floor. A huge kitchen connected to a huge dining room with cathedral windows.

A woman standing by the sink turned to look at him, her eyes wide, her mouth a grim, determined line.

Greta Heilshorn.

On the far side of the enormous open-plan room, hidden beneath the curved legs of an antique dining table, a little girl peered out at him, like a fawn through the trees.

Her eyes, the shape of the nose and mouth, he’d seen those before. He’d seen them in the reflection of a bedroom mirror. The little girl, Leah, looked at lot like her mother, Rebecca Heilshorn.

Brendan got to his feet, watching Greta. The women held a spatula in her hand. The air smelled of onions and garlic — she was cooking an omelet on the stove. Her wrinkled lips parted for a moment, and Brendan heard a hiss, but it could’ve just been the rain, and then he turned as Staryles bounded up the stairs after him.

The little girl, Leah, cried out, “Ma’am!”

Ma’am, Greta Heilshorn, didn’t move. She stood still, eyes locked on Brendan as he lunged further away from the mouth of the basement stairway, clattering into pots and pans hung on the wall. She kept her eyes on him amid the chaos. He distantly realized that the water was running in the sink behind her.

Staryles exploded through the doorway, and immediately swung around to Brendan, who hurled one of the pots at him. Staryles ducked, but didn’t get clear entirely, and the handle of the pot clipped him across the ear. He yelped and put his hand to the side of his head, raising the semi-automatic handgun with the suppressor. He pointed it at Brendan.

“Enough,” shouted Great Heilshorn. Her voice was commanding.

Staryles’ head snapped to the left to look at her, his expression reading,
You for real? I got this guy dead to rights.

Brendan remembered the face. Movie-star looks. Lifeless eyes. The last time he’d seen Jeremy Staryles, he’d been sitting across from Brendan in a New York City jail, giving Brendan one hour to either join him or rot in hell.

“Not here,” Greta responded. “You’ll make a huge mess.”

From where he was, sitting on his butt, surrounded by cutlery, Brendan could only partly see the little girl on the other side of the room. Just her hand and part of her foot from where she was on all fours beneath the table.

“Come on out, Leah,” Greta said. She turned away for a moment and calmly removed the pan from the burner on the stove before the eggs burned.

Leah looked right at Brendan as she went to her grandmother. In that stolen moment, he no longer saw Rebecca’s face, but an expression carved from the experience of living with Greta Heilshorn. He only hoped there was still some innocence left in her, some part of her unspoiled by the wretchedness of this life. He felt a pang of guilt for being a part of it, for bringing the violence of the day.

“Come here, child.”

Leah came out from beneath the table and once again disappeared from his view, blocked by the kitchen island.

Leah crossed the room to Greta, who put her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

“Get him up,” Greta said to Staryles, her eyes locked on Brendan.

“Do it,” Staryles barked, and Brendan rose to his feet, and then Staryles laughed.

Brendan stood shaking, his breath coming in jerky gasps. Greta wriggled her lips for a moment, as if tasting something. To Staryles, she said, “Take him out back and kill him there.”

“Move,” Staryles, and pointed behind him.

Brendan started that way, slowly, keeping his hands out in front of him, palms out. He swiveled his head to look at Greta across the wood block as he walked.

“When you’re finished,” Greta said to Staryles, “you may quarter him, pull him apart, and send his pieces to Jennifer Aiken at the Justice Department.”

Staryles shoved Brendan forward. He entered another massive room, with couches arranged around in squares, with a grand piano, and a large river-stone fireplace. An entire wall of rear-facing windows, floor-to-ceiling. These provided a view of the back lawn sloping up and away to a border of evergreens. There was a long, rectangular garden there. Even from here Brendan could see corn stalks.

Greta’s voice floated in from the kitchen.

“Do it in the garden,” she said. “Just like he killed our Kevin.”

NBC was on the television. A reporter stood in front of a scene of mayhem in Manhattan. The message scrolled beneath the reporter on the screen:
Emergency Broadcast System urges you to stay in your home. Do not attempt to drive or to enter populated areas.

The TV had been on all night.

Jennifer watched from the couch. She rubbed her arms for comfort while she listened to what the reporter was saying.

“. . . A hospital that is unable to get fuel oil this morning, forced to relocate nearly two hundred patients. Police and fire departments are having difficulty communicating as internet services are still down, or have slowed to a crawl. All commercial flights at JFK and LaGuardia are still grounded. The Department of Transportation has reported multiple motor vehicle accidents due to GPS failures. Rioting continues in the Bronx and in Harlem, and spread overnight into Midtown and Downtown Manhattan. The Metro Transit Authority has suspended all subway travel.”

The shot cut from the reporter to hand-held footage that was shaky and blurred. It was like watching video from Benghazi. People were breaking windows and pillaging businesses. Armored vehicles prowled the streets, whole garrisons of National Guardsmen formed phalanxes. The battle scenarios at Camp Edwards had come to life.

The reporter was looking more and more uncomfortable in her position along the West Side Highway. A caravan of police vehicles raced past behind her, lights blazing. She was about to speak when the camera filming her jostled and went dark.

After a few seconds of blank silence, the news anchor came on screen. “We seem to have lost the feed from Shelly. We have an expert on domestic terrorism standing by, Max Kamber from the Department of Defense. We’re unable to get a satellite feed from Washington, but we have Max on our landline phone connection.”

There was a headshot of a gray-haired man in his fifties, suspended in the corner of the screen.

The anchor tilted her head. “Professor Kamber, we’ve heard that this is the work of the cyber hacker group for hire. That the group was contracted by anti-Americans, possibly ISIL.”

“That’s right,” came Kamber’s disembodied voice.

More headshots now filled the image, one after another, among them many of the people she had met the previous night. She saw Gentian. She’d been standing beside him just twenty-four hours ago.

Jennifer let go of her arms started moving about the room. She began looking for supplies, anything she could find; her mother kept some money in an empty baking soda box in the kitchen. It was time to get moving.

She entered the kitchen. She riffled through the cabinets for food, dumping anything she could find into an old gym bag, and found the cash. Not much: a hundred and sixty-four dollars. The anchor’s voice floated from the other room. “What makes a group like this willing to turn on their own country? The anti-American agenda is clear, but many of the Nonsystem members are American citizens. What’s the allure for them?”

Kamber responded: “This group is responsible for the proliferation of identity-concealing software such as Dark Wallet. But the government has consistently shut them down, and they’re frustrated.”

Jennifer checked the date on a jar of peanut butter, didn’t have the patience to find it, tossed it in the bag anyway. “The internet is just like the financial system,” Kamber continued. “And they’re becoming entwined more and more — we’ve designed all the parts, but no one really understands how it operates.”

Jennifer stepped back into the living room to look at the screen.

“Since they are truly unable to circumvent all regulations on the flow of currency, libertarian extremists like Nonsystem resort to this kind of domestic terrorism. This is an act of desperation. An attempt to send a message, that if they cannot be completely free to do whatever they want to online, they’ll try to topple the internet itself.”

Here it comes,
thought Jennifer. It was just as Gentian had said it would be.

“But, they can’t. Not completely. American counter-cyber-terrorism forces are too strong. And we have backup systems that even groups like this are unaware of. You’re going to hear about that soon, I’m sure.”

Back to the anchor. “Police are on the hunt to round up remaining members of Nonsystem, including this young woman, revealed to us just moments ago as Sloane Dewan.”

Sloane’s face appeared. She was smiling in the photo, which looked a few years old — eyes were bright and alive. Jennifer felt something knot deep inside of her. It was the same image she had used at her presentation in Washington just a few days ago.

“Dewan was known as the infamous ‘Baby Sloane,” an infant who miraculously survived an ad hoc birth in an alleyway and was rescued by heroic cop, Seamus Argon. Dewan is the adopted daughter of . . .”

A knock at the front door startled Jennifer.