“That was the plan, until your playmate turned up in Ohio.”
“My playmate?”
“Soren Johansen. You remember, asshole with a knife?”
“Soren? He’s here? How do you know?”
“I know because I pulled every favor I’m owed to implement a nationwide random camera scan. Nobody kills my partner and walks away, I don’t care if World War III is about to start. With everything as it is right now, I could only get public safety cameras, you know, government institutions, airports—”
“Airports?”
Quinn read his tone. “Where exactly—you said you were in Akron. Are you at Fulton International?”
“Couldn’t get into Cleveland with the city shut down, so I came here.”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but so did Soren.”
Cooper felt a tightening in his chest, a weird and sudden pressure. His heart seemed to stick, a beat and then nothing, like a burp that wouldn’t come. An animal panic flooded him, fingers tingling, and then his heart jumped again, the beats coming, fast now. His vision went a little wobbly, and he leaned against the back of the pilot’s seat.
“Coop? You okay?”
It wasn’t fear, although that was there as well. It was something mechanical, like his heart had lost its rhythm. I guess a patched tire isn’t as strong as an undamaged one. He took a breath, concentrated on smoothing out the beats. “I’m fine. Listen, if he’s here, it’s for Ethan.”
“No kidding. That’s why I’ve got no choice but to send the cops.”
Cooper considered it. Why not let the police help? Surely he didn’t have to save the world single-handedly. Especially now.
Then he remembered the scene in the restaurant. The ease with which Soren had murdered Epstein’s highly trained guards. Add to it a scared father with a gun, a man who had no idea about the forces swirling around him. Stir in a handful of suburban cops thrilled to have a little excitement. It would be a disaster.
“Don’t send the cops, Bobby. There’s another option.”
The car was a Porsche 911, one of the new models that on a government salary he’d never even allowed himself to look at. A rear-mounted, turbocharged engine capable of zero to sixty miles per hour in 2.9 seconds, set in a candy-apple red body that screamed sex.
Looks like Epstein took you seriously about needing it to be fast.
Bobby had taken convincing, but in the end, he’d agreed to give Cooper the address of the cabin where Ethan and his family were hiding, as well as a thirty-minute head start on the police. But Soren had a head start too.
Cooper got in the car, fired it up, and was about to blast off when he realized that with his hand in the shape it was, he couldn’t use the stick shift. He pushed in the clutch, pinned the wheel with his right wrist, and then leaned across to shift with his left hand. A wave of exhaustion and frustration washed over him.
What are you doing?
Sitting in the hallway of Epstein’s clinic, he’d heard the truth behind Natalie’s words, good and bad. The truth was that as much as he loved his children, as much as he felt he should be sleeping in the chair next to Todd’s hospital bed, he was too much of the soldier to believe that made sense. It was romantic to believe that he would go ten rounds with the Grim Reaper for Todd’s life, but the truth was that sitting there would have been useless. The world was about to be at war, bombs were about rain on New Canaan, and he had a chance to stop it. So, yeah, better to go.
But the plan had been to find Ethan Park. To use his mind and his gift to track down a scientist and convince him to share what he knew. Not to go into combat. Not to face John Smith’s best friend and best killer.
With every beat of his heart, pain coursed through Cooper, a throb that started in his chest, echoed in his hand, and grated through his head. His vision was a little jumpy—not blurry, but lagging half a frame behind. As he skipped second gear and jump-shifted into third, he remembered the fight in the restaurant. The terrible economy of Soren’s movements, the way he danced around every blow like it hadn’t even been thrown.
For the first time in a long time, Cooper felt real fear. Not nerves or tension or concern. Not panic at an unexpected moment or terror for the safety of those he loved.
The idea of facing Soren again scared him.
And yet, what choice did he have? If Soren got to Ethan first, any hope of the war being averted was doomed. The military would attack New Canaan. The fragile dream would be destroyed, along with tens of thousands of its young dreamers. And after that, America would be over. At least the America he loved.
Not to mention the fact that Natalie and your children are dead-center of the crosshairs.
Once again, it came down to everything. Just as it had in DC months ago, when Peters had kidnapped his family. Once again, Cooper’s whole life lay on the table as fate’s roulette wheel clattered and spun. Only this time, he could barely—
Enough.
Win here, or lose everything.
Let’s see what you’ve got, soldier.
CHAPTER 39
As far back as she could remember, Holly Roge had wanted to fly.
Dad had been part of it, a navy man, a pilot who parked jets on moving aircraft carriers. When other little girls had been lulled to sleep with tales of princesses and unicorns, Dad had lain beside her in the dark and told her what it was like to scream in low and steep, dark water below, a tiny target ahead. How precise the angle had to be to catch the landing cable, how if you screwed up you could slide right off, bounce out into the ocean.
“Was it scary?” she’d asked, always.
And always he’d say, “Sure. But in the good way.”
And after he had kissed her forehead and told her to have beautiful dreams, she’d lie awake staring at her ceiling, wondering what that meant, scary in the good way.
Now, suited up and sitting in the ready room at Ellsworth Air Force Base just east of the Wyoming border, she wondered what Dad would think of all of this. He’d died while she was still at the academy, an aneurysm that took him in his easy chair, fast as a missile with hard lock. He’d never seen her earn her wings, never known that she made top of her class. Never known that she’d been the first woman selected to fly an F-27 Wyvern, that gorgeous piece of $185 million equipment, her second true love. Sixty-seven feet and sixty-five thousand pounds of high-performance glory, capable of soaring eighteen miles high, of after-burner blasting at Mach 2.9, twenty-two hundred magnificent miles an hour. A machine so sophisticated that the computer in the helmet read her brain’s alpha waves, allowing her to control the gauges and secondary systems just by thinking in coded patterns.
A fighter jet that she had been flying over American soil, buzzing low over a city of her own countrymen, carrying a full load of ordnance.
That was the part she didn’t dig, and she didn’t think Dad would have either. She was a warrior, had flown peacekeeping missions all over the world, been selected to fly in the honor guard for Air Force One on President Walker’s trip to India. Her job was to protect America, not threaten it. And no matter what you thought about the abnorms, last she’d heard, Wyoming was still part of the fifty.
The fact that today’s briefing was being given not by Major Barnes, as usual, but by the big dog himself, Lieutenant Colonel Riggs, didn’t make her feel any better about the situation.
“—continued state of high alert. Now, you all know that the Holdfast has antiaircraft batteries.” Riggs paused, a slight smile on his lips as twenty pilots chuckled. “And though it’s true that they would be particularly dangerous to MiG-19s”—more laughter—“that doesn’t mean I want any of you getting careless. Everything by the numbers, people. I want all of my pilots back without a scratch. You’ll be carrying . . .”