The Tomorrow Heist (3 page)

“Let's be The Monarch again.”

Jonathan knew Lew had never minded being The Monarch. Liked it, in fact. Especially the big payouts. They had started all of this because they'd been fed up with the system—­Lew with the army and Jonathan with intelligence. Both had felt they were doing more harm than good. But then a chance meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, had set them on the path to make a difference. Though there was a big distinction between returning some rare books stolen by a delusional security guard and finding a lost Rembrandt the world had thought destroyed. As The Monarch, they were preserving culture and history, but there was a big price to pay.

“What about Natalie?” Jonathan said. She wasn't just Jonathan's daughter, she was Lew's surrogate niece.

“We can figure something out,” Lew said, sounding like a kid trying to convince his dad to take him to a ball game.

“ ‘Figure something out,' ” Jonathan said flatly. “Jesus, you thought harder about which pastries to eat back at the café! Natalie isn't something
to figure out
. She's all that matters.”

“And I don't know that?” Lew said, getting defensive. “I'm just the fucking idiot muscle.”

“I didn't say that,” Jonathan said. Then after a minute: “But there are times—­”

“Fuck you,” Lew said, pushing off from the railing. “If I'm such a mouth breather, get your own fucking money.” He roughly put his glasses on, swung around, and marched off, his coat swirling in his hurry.

“Lew, don't be like that. You know what I meant,” Jonathan said, but Lew kept walking. “Lew! Are you coming tomorrow?”

Lew spun around and walked backward. “Sure! You might need me to lift something. Ladies and Gentlemen, Jonathan the giant brain. Give him a hand,” Lew said to the ­people around him, waving his arms like a circus ringmaster. Then he turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Sometimes I can be such a dick.

Jonathan didn't believe for a minute that all Lew brought to the table was his physicality, but it was a button he could push to make Lew drop The Monarch nonsense. In retrospect, Jonathan knew he was lucky Lew hadn't knocked him on his ass. He had to apologize, but when Lew got like this, you just had to leave him alone for a while. The only person who could cut through his moods was Emily, his on-­again, off-­again girlfriend.

But as far as Jonathan knew, they'd been off for a long while. Ironically, for the same reason Jonathan was staying away from Natalie. Not that Lew would admit it, of course. Jonathan actually wished they could work things out, but he knew Lew could be a lot to take on a constant basis.

She was probably better off without him.

 

Chapter Two

North London

3:00
P.M.
Local Time

E
MILY
'
S
HEAD
ROCKED
back from the masked man's slap, blood and spittle flinging across her living room. White flashes exploded in her head, and her ears rang as she distantly felt hands push her back down into the chair. She coughed and spit more blood as the white faded, and her two captors came back into focus, one beating her while another stood back a little holding a gun even though they'd duct-­taped her hands to the arms of the chair.

“Where are they?” an electronic voice with a South African accent demanded. It came from the iPad sitting on her coffee table beside her. A man with deep black skin and an eye patch peered out from the screen: Canton George. She'd met him before, only then,
he
had been the one being beaten for information. That scenario had ended with George's being locked in his own vault and his ill-­gotten mansion explosively spread across half an acre.

He'd been hunting Jonathan and Lew ever since.

She wanted to scream and cry—­to give in to the fear and pain—­but that was exactly what George wanted. And to be honest, after searching for her for so long, she was a little insulted that he was phoning it in though she was pretty sure she knew why he wasn't there in person. George had found Natalie in her British Columbia boarding school about a year ago, and he'd tried to take on Jonathan and Lew in person. It had not worked out well, as his eye patch and the scar peeking out from under it attested.

“They're right outside your compound, Georgie. I'd start running if I were you,” she said. She knew she was going to pay for the lie, but the look of fear on George's face, even though it only lasted a second, made it worth it. His remaining eye widened, and he disappeared from the screen, apparently gone to make sure she was lying. When he returned, with a very different look on his face, Emily was laughing harder than she had in a long time. Her face still felt like it was on fire, and the teeth on one side of her mouth felt loose when she touched them with her tongue, but this little victory made her momentarily forget the danger under her sofa.

“Again!” he shouted, his anger throwing spittle onto the screen.

Emily's laughter was abruptly cut off by a powerful right cross from one of the masked men. This time she did lose a tooth, and she was pretty sure her nose cracked. She spit out the tooth and tried to put on a brave face and laugh some more, but it came out as mewling.

She was forcing herself not to look under her sofa. Her cell phone was under there, dimly glowing its existence, but to Emily it felt like a spotlight. She'd been on the phone with Natalie when the masked goons had burst in through her door. The door had hit her from behind, and the phone had gone flying, luckily ending up under the sofa. It was encrypted, but she hadn't had time to lock the screen. All they had to do was look at her call log, and they'd track Natalie down in a matter of minutes. She just prayed the connection had been severed. If Natalie was still on the line listening to this nightmare—­she shook that idea away. It was too horrible, and she needed to concentrate on coming out of this alive so she could warn Jonathan and Lew.

“Miss Burrows, be sensible,” George said, his voice quieter as he feigned compassion.

No one had called her that name in over a year. It was her pen name back when she was a writer though her only work had been about The Monarch, Jonathan and Lew's abandoned alter ego.

“If I were sensible, I would have put a slug into your psychotic brain when I had the chance,” Emily said. This enraged George again.

“Another!” he shouted. The masked man wound up and hit her again, this time with a closed fist. He hit her so hard, her slender frame was knocked right out of the chair, and one of her hands tore loose of her taped bondage. Lying on the floor, the chair still attached to one hand and on top of her, she fought for breath, coughing. She felt something in her mouth and spit it out. Another tooth landed on the carpet beside the first—­right beside her phone.

“Pick her up, idiot,” George barked from the screen.

The man crouched to pick her up but hesitated. He reached past her head and under the couch.

No!

Up on her knees, she swung her free hand, knocking the phone from his hand. Then she gripped the arm of the chair in her still-­taped hand, looking into the eyes of her assailant. It only took him a second to realize what she was going to do.

“Don't—­”

She swung the chair at him with all her strength. The hardwood legs slammed into his face and raised arms. As he howled, and before the other man could react, she drove one of her long legs into the wounded man's midsection. With an
oof!
, the masked brute fell back against her bookshelf, howling. She tried to get to her feet to smash the phone, but the wounded hood's partner swung his gun at her. She caught his arm and used her weight and the swing's momentum to pull him down onto the floor with her, slamming her knee into his throat. Before she could do anything else, the first man picked her up from behind and tossed her and the chair through the air against the same bookshelf. Excruciating pain burst out from her side as she fell to the floor in a heap, the chair smashing to bits. She fought for her breath, every inhale now a stabbing pain. Lew had taught her how to defend herself, but in the end she was just too slight.

The man who'd thrown her picked up the phone while his partner lay motionless where she'd left him. She wanted to jump up and run away, but the pain was just too much. She could feel her consciousness starting to swim. But through all of that, the worst thing she felt was the grief.

Emily had almost been responsible for Jonathan's and Lew's demise two years ago, but she'd made amends, and in the end, she'd not only helped them, she'd had a torrid love affair with Lew. But it was all for naught. She was right back where she'd been at the start, responsible for their impending deaths. All because she cared.

She'd felt sorry for Natalie, being left alone. She understood why Jonathan had severed contact with her, but that didn't mean she agreed with his actions. Despite her promise to him, she'd been calling Natalie on a regular basis, keeping her up to date on her father and her uncle Lew. Not that Emily's motivations would matter if George got ahold of Natalie.

“I've got it, sir!” the masked man exclaimed. “His daughter's phone number.”

“Please! She's just a—­” Emily's pleas were cut off by a kick to her side.

“Bring me the girl.”

“What about Burrows?” the underling asked, looking at his partner. “I think she might have killed Neill.”

George didn't even hesitate. “Kill her.” The screen went blank. George was gone, along with Emily's chances of saving Natalie.

And that was it. It was over. The sin she'd committed years ago returned in full.

The man pulled out a gun and turned toward Emily.

At least I'll be first, she thought. Standing by and watching it all go down again was something she just couldn't take.

Emily closed her eyes and braced herself for the shot. A crash reached her ears, and she flinched before she realized it wasn't a gunshot. She opened her eyes and saw that her front windows had shattered into the flat; two ropes were hanging on their sills, left behind by the two new masked men standing before her. These men looked different—­more professional. They were wearing body armor, and each held an automatic weapon, red beams slicing from their sights. They instantly targeted the other masked man and the one on the floor, efficiently putting a staccato hail of bullets into each one's head.

“Clear!” one of the men shouted after checking the entire flat.

“We're clear, sir,” the other one said, even though he wasn't wearing an earpiece.

Her front door opened, and a well-­dressed man with incredibly shiny black shoes walked over to where Emily was huddled and crouched beside her.

“Can you hear me, Miss Denham? Are you all right?” The man said, using her real name.

Before she could answer, the murkiness grabbed her and pulled her down into unconsciousness, the idea of Jonathan and Lew—­mostly Lew—­being safe allowing her to let go. She pictured Lew's face one final time before everything was gone.

 

Chapter Three

Houston, Texas

12:02
P.M.
Local Time

T
HE
HELICOPTER
SWUN
G
in from the east. Per Broden stood by his rental car dressed in a tan-­wool trench coat over a matching three-­piece suit and perfectly knotted brown bow tie. He held his briefcase in one black-­gloved hand, his other hand hung, ungloved, by his side as he waited.

His journey had started over thirty-­six hours ago in a place where his attire made more sense. Stockholm, Sweden, his home since he was a boy, was almost fifty-­one hundred miles from the spot where Per was currently rooted. At fifty-­four, he still called it home though in all those years, he'd traveled the world several times over.

The helicopter was only fifty feet off the ground when it stopped its arc above the scrub grass that stretched as far as the eye could see. It rocked for a moment, then descended to the desert floor, blowing Per's thinning dirty blond hair from its perfect side part down over his round-­lensed spectacles, dust following the wind and peppering Per. He remained still.

When the chopper finally came to rest, Per reached up with his free hand and swept his hair back into place.

A man in jeans, a blue-­checked button-­down shirt and black cowboy hat stepped from the chopper. Holding his hat in place and bending slightly to avoid the rotor blades, he jogged to where Per was waiting.

“You Broden?” he said with a thick Texas accent.

Per took a business card from his inside vest pocket and handed it to the man: “Per Broden, International Investigations.”

The man read the card, shrugged and handed it back to Per, who pocketed it.

“Name's Green. Hank Green,” the man said, wiping sweat off his brow with one forearm. “Jesus, you must be hotter than a four-­balled tomcat in that getup. I work for Mr. Harcourt. He's waiting up at the main house.” Hank eyed Per's briefcase. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Yes, I do,” Per said, the first words out of his mouth in almost two days.

Hank jerked back slightly at the refusal. “Look,
amigo
. Either you let me look in that case and frisk you, or this meeting ends before it starts.”

“I understand,” Per said.

“Good. Now if you'll—­”

“Good day,” Per said as he turned and opened the car door.

“Whoa, hang on,” Hank said, grabbing Per's arm. Per continued into the car as if nothing was stopping him. Hank looked surprised that Per wasn't as weak as he appeared. It was a look Per was well acquainted with.

“Tell Mr. Harcourt I hope he solves his mystery. Now please back up,” Per said.

“All right, all right,” Hank said. “I won't look in it. Can you at least leave it in the car?”

“Yes, that would be acceptable,” Per said. He placed his briefcase on the passenger seat and rejoined Hank.

“Should I bother to try to frisk you?” Hank asked with a smirk.

“It would not be wise,” Per said flatly.

“Huh. You're an odd one, ain't cha?”

“That would be an accurate assessment, yes.”

They climbed into the helicopter, buckled themselves in, and, a few moments later, they were airborne. Per sat straight in his seat, neither looking out the window nor avoiding the view. He simply wasn't interested in it. What he was interested in was why his new employer hadn't been here to meet Per himself.

“Mr. Harcourt doesn't leave the house much these days,” Hank said, apparently anticipating Per's question. “He's taking these attacks personally. But you can't really blame him.”

Per nodded slightly and waited for more information.

“To be honest, he thinks someone is trying to kill him. Figgers the words left behind is just a smoke screen to draw him out.”

Per raised an eyebrow and turned to look at Hank. This was why he was here.

“And what do you think, Mr. Green?” Per asked.

“Me?” Hank said, surprised. “Hell, I ain't paid to think!” He slapped Per's shoulder as he laughed a loud, hacking laugh.

Per believed him.

Thirty minutes later, a large, ranch-­style house appeared on the horizon, surrounded by a barn and a corral filled with horses. They landed in the front yard as workers fought to control the spooked horses. Per followed Hank out and up to the front door.

Hank started to open the door, but then stopped and turned to Per, concern in his eyes.

“You have to help him, Broden. It was all I could do to get him to meet with someone. He's a real mess. I may work for him, but he's the best friend I ever had, and it kills me that I can't do nothin' for him.”

Per waited, then realized they weren't going to pass through the door until he responded verbally.

“I'll do what I can, Mr. Green,” Per said. It was the truth. Per was actually incapable of doing any less. But truth be told, he couldn't care less about a rich Texan's sudden phobias. He was here for one thing and one thing only—­the puzzle.

As a child in Stockholm, Per's brother Peter had been kidnapped by a serial killer. The killer taunted Per's family for weeks with riddles and unsolvable clues. In the end, his brother was killed. Per had thought at the time that if he'd just been smarter, more clever, better at puzzles, he could have saved Peter. Despite reassurances from his parents, the authorities, and several therapists over the years, Per still blamed himself for Peter's death.

Since then, he'd spent his life solving puzzles; first for the police and now freelance as an investigator. Per would never let himself feel that way again. He'd rather die than fail.

Every time Per solved a case, he felt like he'd made an atonement to his murdered brother. A drop in a bucket that would never be full.

Per followed Hank into the house, and he suddenly felt like he was only a few kilometers from home. Despite the mansion's exterior, the interior was decorated in classic European designs rather than what one expected of a Texas estate. The space was immense, easily fifteen meters high with an expanse more like an auditorium than a living room. The floor was cream-­colored marble, brown diamond shapes inset where the large tiles met. The furnishings were green and gold and crimson. Staircases ran up the walls on both sides of the room, large paintings resting on the wall wherever a landing occurred. Against the far wall was a fireplace with more furniture arranged around it. In the corner was a grand piano just a few feet from a dining-­room table covered in a deep red tablecloth and surrounded by fourteen chairs. In the center of the room was a large plant on top of a working fountain, gurgling away.

They walked to the fountain, and Hank asked Per to wait. He went up one of the staircases and was gone for almost half an hour, his absence accompanied by echoing shouts. Finally, he returned, and asked Per to follow him upstairs. At the end of a long corridor, they entered an office bigger than Per's entire house.

The office was decorated as extravagantly as the rest of the house, but a foggy sheen seemed to obscure the brilliance. The leather sofa against the wall held rumpled pillows and a blanket, and there were more than a few empty beer bottles along the floor beside it. From the smell, Per doubted that Harcourt had left anytime recently.

At the end of the room, slumped behind a wide desk covered with food trays and open books, James Harcourt sat dressed in a green-­plaid bathrobe. Per could see a shiny silver .44 Magnum revolver lying in front of Harcourt along with a mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel's and several half-­empty bottles of pills.

Harcourt was a big man with a wild, unkempt beard. Even seated, Per could tell that Harcourt was taller than he, but since he was only five-­nine, that didn't say a whole lot.

“Mr. Broden, this is James Harcourt,” Hank said before fading into the background. Per stepped in front of the desk and waited for his host to speak. Or, to at least acknowledge he was there. Five minutes later, he got his wish.

“Jesus! Where'd you come from?” Harcourt slurred, grabbing his gun and pushing back in his overstuffed brown-­leather office chair. The only thing that kept Per rooted to his spot was that despite his antics, Harcourt had yet to point his gun anywhere but at the floor.

“He's the Swedish detective,” Hank said, floating into the scene again. “You sent for him, Jim. Remember?” Hank looked at Per apologetically.

This was not what Per had expected. When the first cryonics facility had been bombed, and the first occurrence of the enigmatic “Dead Lights” phrase had been scrawled onto the pavement, Per had read about it on the Internet. He'd immediately contacted Harcourt with an offer to investigate. After several more bombings and even more e-­mail exchanges, Harcourt had finally acquiesced and invited Per for a meeting. But the man Per had communicated with online had been articulate and wary. Not the self-­indulgent, ready-­to-­surrender figure before him.

Harcourt looked at Hank, then back at Per. A long moment stretched out as the big man's eyes fought to focus.

“Right. Right,” Harcourt said, seeming to just now notice that he was holding his gun. “Jesus, sorry . . . Broden, is it?” Per nodded as Harcourt put the gun back on the desk before swallowing down more pills with the whiskey. “Sit down, sit down.”

Per obliged. Harcourt shook his head and grunted, apparently trying to clear his head.

“The pictures, Jim. Show him the pictures,” Hank said before taking a seat against the wall, holding his hat in his lap.

“Uh. Right, the pictures.”

Harcourt picked up a stack of eight-­by-­ten photos from his desk. He looked at them before turning his attention back to Per.

“It started a few weeks ago,” Harcourt said, handing Per one of the photos. Per took it from him. It was a picture of what had once been a building, now half-­missing and all burned. On the remaining brickwork in front of the structure were the words “Dead Lights.” It was from a different angle, but this was the image Per had seen on the Internet that had first drawn his interest to the mystery.

“What am I looking at?” Per asked, willing to play whatever game Harcourt was selling. To a point.

“How much do you know about me, Broden?”

“Not much,” Per lied. If he hadn't known everything there was to know about Harcourt, he never would have gotten on the plane to come here.

Harcourt had made his money like most millionaires in Texas—­in oil. But he'd gotten out of the black-­gold business years ago. Since then, he'd been interested in one thing and one thing alone—­life extension. In every capacity.

Toward that interest, he had created the Crystasis Foundation. The rumors in the life-­extension chat rooms Per had frequented before coming here were that, in truth, Harcourt was only interested in finding ways to extend his own life. Per thought it made sense that someone who was business savvy wouldn't experiment on himself but find a way to experiment on others until he found what he was looking for. And Per thought the influx of capital from ­people willing to pay hundreds of thousands for even a shot at more life wouldn't hurt either. But the facilities where Harcourt stored frozen corpses with the hope that one day they could be thawed and cured of what killed them was just part of his longevity empire.

“Look around you, Broden. It looks like I have everything a man could want, doesn't it?”

“Some men.”

“I've been lucky. I have enough money for several lifetimes. The problem, of course, is that I don't
have
several lifetimes. Like everyone else, I have just one. I can't change that. But I can make the one life I do have long. Really long.” He took a long pull on the bottle and wiped his mouth with his forearm.

Per just looked at him.

“That used to be one of my life-­extension facilities. There used to be seven of them around the world. Here, South Africa, Europe . . . even had one in Russia. Most of them are just repositories, but I've got a research lab up in Toronto too.”

“You
used to
have seven?”

Harcourt tossed three more photos on the desk in front of Per. “Over the past few weeks, there have been bombings at three of my facilities. No warning, no explanation. Just that goddamn message on the bricks in front of the ashes.

“I've beefed up the security at my other facilities, but I don't want to just be safe. If a coyote is taking your herd, you don't build a bigger fence; you kill the mongrel.”

Per looked at the photos for a while longer, then put them down in a neat pile on the desk. He leaned back and brushed some hairs from his suit.

“The only leads we've got are this man and this security camera picture.” Harcourt handed Per two final photos.

Per examined the first photo. It was of a thin, bearded man in a lab coat. The word “Crystasis” C
RYSTASIS
was embroidered across the lab coat's breast. Beneath was a name tag: “Dr. Reese.” He put the picture with the others.

“Up until six months ago, Dr. Chris Reese worked out of my lab in Toronto on special projects,” Harcourt said.

“What happened six months ago?”

“He just up and disappeared. Poof. He didn't resign or, as far as my inquiries could tell, take a job anywhere else. He emptied his bank account and walked away from his house. No mortgage payments or other bills have been paid since then. A few months later, the attacks started.”

Per turned his attention to the final picture. It was dark, the only source of light the flames from the burning building in the background. He squinted and could just make out a figure on a motorcycle. The shape of the skintight leather and the hair splaying back from the rider's helmet told him the rider was female, and probably young.

“That was taken by a warehouse security camera just up the road from the first facility that was attacked minutes after the alarm went out to the fire department. We enhanced the photo as much as we could without washing out the details. Afraid that's the best we could do.”