Читать книгу Twilight Hunger - Maggie Shayne - Страница 9

Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of Coke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn’t have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles passing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.

A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max’s friends as she let them in. Maxine shut the TV off, turned and opened her bedroom door as they came hurrying through the house.

Her two best friends came around a corner into the hall and stopped when they saw her standing there. Something was up. Jason didn’t shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm—her real name was Tempest, but she hated it—was downright pale. Maxine’s mom was right on their heels.

“So what is it, what’s burning?” Max asked.

“It’s Spook Central,” Jason said without even missing a beat. “It’s bad.”

“It’s awful,” Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”

Spook Central was Maxine’s pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab—that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there—they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?

Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to God the one she had always considered the most likely—that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons—was dead wrong.

Nightmare images from Stephen King’s The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to snatch a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. “Max, don’t you go over there. You’ll just get in the way and maybe get hurt.”

“Come on, Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else.”

“God, how can you be so innocent?”

Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine’s mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. “Be careful.”

“Always.” Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.

They all piled into Jason’s creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.

Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”

They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

“Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”

“They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”

“I like your mom,” Jason put in.

Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”

Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

“He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”

“Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”

Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

“This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

“I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

“I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”

“If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”

The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

“What?” she asked.

“You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”

“No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”

Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”

“Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.

Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”

“And just what do you think there’s gonna be left to see, Max?” Jason pointed at the place. “It’s completely engulfed in flames.”

“I won’t know until I try.”

He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual passersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay’s older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.

More sirens came, and Max looked back toward the road to see police cars, cops getting out, dispersing some of the curious onlookers who had now begun to gather on the road out front. “We just made it in time,” she whispered.

“If they catch us in here, our asses will be toast,” Jason said.

“If we get any closer to that inferno, they might be toast anyway,” Stormy added.

The firemen ahead fought on, soaking the place down, beating back the flames and pressing ever closer. The trucks rolled forward a little more, and Max urged her unwilling comrades to do the same. “See that flagpole over there?” she asked, pointing. Jason and Storm looked at it, then at her.

“Once they get up that far, we can cut around the side of the building and make our way to the back.”

“And then a flaming wall can come down on us, crushing us and roasting us at the same time,” Storm said. Her gaze was fixed on the burning building, and the flames’ reflection danced in her eyes.

Max swallowed any second thoughts she had about dragging her two best friends into this, beat them down the way the firefighters beat down the flames. It was for the greater good, she told herself. And besides, they wouldn’t get hurt. She wouldn’t let them get hurt. Maxine Stuart took care of her friends.

Movement drew her attention. “There they go!”

As the fire truck rolled ahead, Max ran forward, cutting off to the left and moving rapidly away from the pool of firelight that spread like an aura from ground-zero. The trees ended there, and she paused at the very last one. She tried not to feel a huge sense of relief when she realized Jason and Storm were still at her side. But she felt it anyway. God, they were loyal.

The distance from the front to the back of the rubble that had once been the main building was at least half a football field, without so much as a shrub for cover. But it was dark. Getting darker with every cloud of thick smoke that wafted from the fire.

“We can make it,” Max said.

“They’re gonna haul our asses to jail for this, Maxie,” Jason said.

“Ready?”

Neither of them answered her. Max licked her lips and trusted them. “Go!” And she ran.

She was never certain they were following until she stopped when she reached what had been the far end of the building and they bumped into her in the darkness. Hands gripped shoulders as they steadied each other. Then they stood for a moment, catching their breath, squinting into the darkness. There were fifty feet between where they stood and the smoldering remains at the rear of the building. It no longer much resembled a building at all. It wasn’t tall or square. It was a heap. Flames leaped up here and there, although most of the real fire had moved hungrily toward the front, having had its fill here, it seemed. There were glowing red shapes forming mounds underneath the charred forms of the skeletal underpinning. There were ashes, smoke. Were there people in there? she wondered. Bodies?

“This is close enough,” Stormy whispered.

Max looked around. “You see that shrub over there? It’s out of the smoke.” She pointed. “You two wait for me there. I promise I won’t be long.”

“Don’t, Max,” Jason warned. He sounded pissed off. “Just … don’t.”

“Five minutes,” she said. “Just five freaking minutes. This is once in a lifetime, Jay.” She didn’t wait for him to argue. She ran, instead.

They didn’t follow this time.

It was hot. Damned hot, and the smoke was burning her eyes and her nose, and she kept trying not to cough too loudly and give herself away. She ran until she reached the rear of the building, and then she moved closer and closer to it, as close as she could stand to get. She figured her hair was probably getting a little singed, and she had to watch where she put her feet to keep from stepping on smoldering embers that would have melted right through the soles of her shoes.

She looked around, squinting through the veil of smoke and the shimmering heat waves. There were several things on the ground in one area. Large broken boxes—computers. Smashed to bits. Some burned and charred, others just smashed. Had someone thrown them out the windows in an effort to save them? Or maybe to destroy them? She kicked at one. What she wouldn’t have given for a hard drive from one of those machines. God only knew what she might find. Bending, she reached out to pick through the pile of rubble, but the pieces were so hot they seared her fingers, and she jerked her hand away, sucking air through her teeth.

“Shit.” She put her burned fingers to her lips, blew on them, drew them away and shook them in the air as she kept on walking. Her foot kicked something that rolled, and she looked down, frowning, looking closer. When she realized she was bending over a charred forearm and hand, she pulled back so suddenly she almost fell over. “Jesus!”

Her breathing quickened now, her lungs sucking in more smoke with every breath, but that couldn’t be helped. She continued her search, spotting other evidence of human remains in the wreckage. More and more of it. Bodies. Parts of bodies. It was as if she had stepped into hell’s dumping ground. Jesus, why hadn’t anyone been able to get out alive? What the hell had happened here?

This was stupid. She had been a fool to come here. She started to turn, to go back, when movement caught her eye. Movement in the smoky distance. She went still, squinting, staring.

Gradually, the movement took shape. A man, his clothes burned, his skin so sooty she couldn’t tell if he was black or white. He was hunched over, walking unevenly, bending and straightening over and over again. It looked as if he was picking things up, dragging himself away from the wreckage and picking things up as he went. She was about to offer to help him when she heard her name shouted from a distance.

The man heard Stormy’s call, too, and he went stiff, jerking his head toward the voice. A tongue of flame leapt to life somewhere near him and illuminated his face for just an instant. His hair had been burned completely away from one side of his head, and the scalp and one side of his face was charred. Black, with pink showing through here and there. She tried to memorize his features, the rounded face, the shape of his chin. He tucked whatever he had been holding into his pockets and ran in a lumbering, uneven gait away from the voice and right toward Maxine.

She ducked down low, held her breath, willed herself not to move. She didn’t know for sure that the man was dangerous, but if he were up to anything good, he wouldn’t be running away. Maybe he was just a snoop, like she was. But probably not. He’d been inside that burning building. That much was obvious.

He limped past her, never even looking down at her as she sat there fighting not to shiver in fear. He moved so close she could smell his charred flesh, and it made her stomach clench reflexively.

Something fell from his jacket. Something—no, two somethings—dropped to the hot, rubble-strewn ground right at her feet. He never noticed, just kept going, dragging one leg, lunging with the other, until he vanished in the smoke.

Swallowing hard, Maxine reached for the items. One was a CD-ROM. The other, some kind of ID badge. She swore every nerve ending in her body tingled with electricity as she tucked the two still-warm items carefully into her pocket and, turning, ran back the way she had come. She refused to look again at the carnage. Refused to look behind her, even when she swore she felt the disfigured man’s gaze burning into her back. She just hurried as fast as she could back to where she’d left her friends and fell to her knees near the shrub where they waited.

“God, thank God, you’re back!” Storm said. She bent over Max, stroking her back. “Are you all right? What happened back there?”

“Did you find anything? What did you see?” Jason asked.

Maxine lifted her head, looked at them. “It’s … there were … bodies.”

“Oh, God,” Storm said, closing her eyes.

Max gripped Jason’s forearm, and he helped her to her feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here, okay?” he suggested.

She nodded. They fell into step together, with Max in the center, her two friends flanking her almost protectively. They had made it almost all the way to the front gate when the sounds of rumbling motors flooded the night and vehicles came roaring along the street and into the drive. They ducked into the nearby pines, watching as camo-painted trucks and Jeeps with spotlights mounted on them bounded past. At least one vehicle had a machine gun mounted on a tripod in the back. Soldiers armed with weapons came spilling out of the trucks and fanned out onto the grounds.

Ten feet ahead of Max, a cop stood with his back to them, looking at the commotion with his head tilted to one side. Her cop, Maxine realized with a rush of relief.

Jason saw him at the same time, squeezed Max’s arm, whispered, “Cop.”

“It’s okay. It’s Lou Malone.”

Jason sent her a frown.

“He teaches that women’s self-defense course I take.”

“You remember him, Jay,” Storm put in. “He used to work our high school dances. He’s the one Maxie always had a crush on.”

“Oh, yeah. That one.” He sent Max a look that asked if she still did, but she just rolled her eyes and looked away.

Someone spoke into a bullhorn, startling her so much that she jerked her gaze away from the back of Lou’s head. “This is a government facility and therefore, a military operation. Local firefighters are to cease all activity at once. No one is to leave this site without clearance. Line up in an orderly fashion near the front gate and you’ll be escorted off the premises. That is all.”

“What the hell is going on, Max?” Storm whispered, clutching Maxine’s arm. “They’ve got guns.”

“They’re not going to use them.” Jason tried to sound confident and sure of himself but missed that goal by about a mile. “I mean, they’re soldiers. They have to carry guns. Right?”

They watched from their pine-scented blind as the soldiers tugged firemen away from their hoses. Some of the firefighters obeyed, moving to form a straggling line by the gate. Those who didn’t move fast enough were searched where they were, then escorted to the front gate and through it. More soldiers searched the fire trucks, and the vehicles in the street, as well.

“Well, I’ll be dipped,” Officer Malone said to himself. “What the hell is all this about?”

Licking her lips, Maxine stepped out of her cover, walked up to Lou and cleared her throat. He turned fast, then gaped at her in surprise. She loved him. Had since tenth grade. And it didn’t matter that his face was hard and lined, or that he was eighteen years older than she was, or that he saw her as little more than a pain-in-the-ass kid with a big imagination.

“Well, if it isn’t Mad Maxie Stuart, my favorite redhead,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Why the hell am I not surprised to see you here?”

“Hey, Lou. I just wanted to see the fire.”

“Uh-huh.” He glanced at her friends. “Don’t you two know better than to let her drag you into her schemes?”

They shrugged, said nothing.

“Lou, I don’t like this,” Max said. “This whole soldier bit. They’re searching everyone.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“Just an excuse to grope the females,” Stormy said. “If they think they’re gonna run their hands all over my body, they’d better think again.”

Maxine watched Lou’s eyes slide to hers as Stormy spoke and knew her friend had fallen on the right tactic. “I don’t relish the idea of them copping a feel of my ass, either, Storm.” Even as she said it, a soldier slammed a firefighter who resisted him up against the guardhouse. Lou saw it and winced.

“I’m scared, Lou. I just want to get out of here,” Max said.

Lou Malone pursed his lips in thought; then, finally, he nodded. “It’s not like you kids are any threat to national security. These guys are a little overzealous, I think. Look, there’s a break in the fence, just past those pines. See that tallest one? It’s near that. Go on, get outta here. I never saw you.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

He gave Maxine a worried nod, and, impulsively, she leaned up and planted a kiss on his cheek.

“Get your ass straight home, Mad Max. No more screwing around with grown-up stuff, okay?”

“I promise,” she said. Then she ran off in the direction he’d shown her.

Max waited until Jason and Storm had gone home. She told them nothing about the man she had seen gathering evidence from the rubble. Nothing about the trophies she had recovered. She didn’t want to tell them anything that could put them in danger or make them accessories if what she had done turned out to be a crime. Late that night, very late, she gently wiped the soot from the partially melted plastic of the name badge.

There was a photograph of a man, and the words, “Frank W. Stiles. Security Level: Alpha. DPI.”

She knew what “Security Level: Alpha” meant. She had learned that the first time she tried to uncover the truth about UFOs and government cover-ups. Alpha was the word used to indicate the top-level security clearances in certain agencies under the auspices of the CIA. But in all her years of research she had never once come across any reference to any agency or operation called DPI.

Jesus, what the hell had she stumbled upon?

She was nearly shaking when she washed the soot from the CD-ROM and slid it into her computer, praying the heat hadn’t ruined it.

It hadn’t.

When she clicked RUN, the driver whirred and the screen went black. Red letters lit up the screen.

TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS

of

THE DIVISION OF PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS

CASE FILES D145.9—H376.51 Continue?

The final word blinked its question at her, almost daring her to take it up on the challenge.

Stiffening her spine, she clicked on the word and brought up a table of contents. Names. They were simply names.

Damien, aka Namtar, Damien, aka Gilgamesh

Daniels, Matthew

Daniella

Dante

Devon, Josephina

Obviously alphabetical, the list began in the Ds and ended in the Hs. Some were first and last names, some only one name. There were maybe a hundred entries, as near as she could tell without counting. Clicking back to the top of the list, she began scrolling down it. Then she came to one that made her stop in her tracks.

Dracul, Vlad (See full bio for alias list.)

“What the hell?” Curious, she clicked on the name, and a graphic popped up. A drawing, not a photo, of a thoroughly modern-looking man, with long black hair and unusually full lips.

The most well known of the species, he was born in Carpathia and transformed, as nearly as we can tell, in his early twenties. Sired by an unknown enemy soldier, probably a Turk. Most recent sighting, May, 1992, Paris.

“Most recent sighting?” She blinked at the screen, her mind not quite digesting what she was seeing. “Ninety-two?”

Below the graphic, with its piercing eyes and pale skin, were more choices: Known Kills, Known Associates, Known Havens, Full Bio.

“What in the name of God is this shit?” She hit the back button, clicked on another name in the list, and again was brought to a screen with an image of the person, this one an actual photograph labeled “taken before transformation” and a brief bio.

Josephina Devon. Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1962. Transformed in the summer of her 30th year, June 1992. Sire: R-532 aka Rhiannon. The vampire

“Vampire? “

was captured by DPI researchers in December of the same year. Held at DPI Headquarters in White Plains, NY, USA. Expired in captivity, 1995.

Again, the same choices were offered for further information, this time with one notable addition: “Tests Performed on the Subject & Results of Same.”

This was not real.

This could not be real.

When she clicked on “full bio” she found a document more than a hundred pages long. With details that made her mind spin with the impossibility of it all. When she opened the file that referred to tests performed, she thought she was going to be ill. This person, this woman, had been a lab rat. Held and experimented upon in that very building. In her own town.

But no. It hadn’t happened, because it wasn’t real.

There were no such things as vampires. Much less a covert government agency devoted to researching them.

And yet, here was the proof that there were.

There were.

What the hell was she supposed to do now?

The next day, she still hadn’t decided, when the doorbell rang and she answered it to find no one there. Just an unmarked manila envelope on the doorstep. Her mother was already at work. Most days she left before Max was even out of bed. The odd delivery made Maxine curious, particularly after last night. She looked up and down the street. No strangers lurked anywhere. No suspicious vehicles with tinted windows slid past. The neighborhood was stirring to life. People opening their doors, picking up their morning papers.

Maxine picked up the envelope, looked at it, turned it over. Nothing. Not one word, not a label, not a stamp.

Frowning, she went back inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She took the envelope to the kitchen table, opening it as she walked, and she tipped it, dumping the contents out beside her bowl of corn flakes. Photos. What the hell? She frowned. Polaroids. Three of them. Then she blinked and snatched them up. That was Jason, sound asleep in his bed! She moved it to the back of the pile. The next shot was of Stormy, from the neck up, in her own shower. Maxine swore and looked at the third one. It was a shot of her mother, getting out of her car in the parking garage of the hospital where she worked as an R.N.

The telephone rang, and she damn near jumped out of her skin. Maxine clenched her teeth, dropped the photos on the table and went to pick up the phone.

“Do you like the photos, Maxine?”

The voice was a whisper so cold it sent a chill down her spine. “Who the hell is this?” Maxine reached for the answering machine on the table, jabbed the record button with her forefinger.

“Those shots were all taken in the past twelve hours, you know.”

“Why?” Her hand was clenching the telephone so hard her knuckles were white. She wished it was this son of a bitch’s neck. How dare he? God, he’d been in Jason’s bedroom. In Storm’s bathroom. And in that dark parking garage, alone with her mother.

“To show you how easy it is for me to learn everything about you, and how quickly and effortlessly I can get to the people you love. To shoot them. With a camera, this time, but—”

“You fuck with my family or my friends and you die. Do you understand me?”

“That’s quite the threat, coming from a girl barely out of high school.” He laughed, a deep, low sound that changed into a racking cough.

Max held the phone away from her ear, looking at it as realization dawned. It was him. The burned guy she’d seen at the fire. He must have seen her after all. He stopped coughing, and she put the phone back to her ear. “Why are you calling me? What do you want from me, anyway?”

“I want you to forget everything you saw last night. Pretend you were never there. Tell no one.”

“Fine. I’ll be glad to. If you’ll tell me what happened there last night.”

“I’m not making a bargain with you, Maxine. You’ll do as I say. Forget you ever saw me.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, you nosy little bitch!” She jerked in reaction to the anger in his voice. “If you so much as mention anything about seeing me at that fire to anyone, the next thing you find on your doorstep will be a body. Or a part of one. I’ll just shuffle those photos and pick one at random. Are you following me now?”

“Yes!” She paused, took a breath, her outrage completely smothered by her fear. He would hurt her mother, her friends. “Yes, I … look, I don’t know anything. I’m no threat to you. And I’m the only one that saw you. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anyone. They don’t know anything.” She was shaking. She pressed a hand to the wall because her legs felt so unsteady.

“That’s good. See that it stays that way. I’ll be watching you, Maxine. And rest assured, I know how. I’m going to hear everything you say and see everything you do. Don’t test me.”

“I won’t.”

He hung up the phone.

Maxine wanted to sink to the floor. She looked around her, feeling exposed, vulnerable. She depressed the cutoff, then lifted it again. With a trembling forefinger, she punched the star key, then the six and the nine. Maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe he wasn’t kidding and would know she had tried.

“The last number that called this line was,” the computer-generated voice said. Then it paused as its components worked. “We’re sorry. That number is not available.” It clicked off.

Swallowing hard, Maxine hung up the phone.

What the hell was she supposed to do now? Was he watching her? Could he see her even now? Were there bugs or hidden cameras in her own house? She searched her mind and mentally wondered what Oliver Stone would do.

She told herself to use her head. To think.

Okay. The guy had been in a fire last night. Wounded, burned. Suffering from smoke inhalation, too, by the sounds of his cough. He must have spotted her leaving, maybe even followed her home, and then followed Jason and Storm. He learned where they lived, went and got a camera, sneaked back and took the shots. Then he returned to Max’s home and watched the place. He’d followed her mom to work in the wee hours of this morning and taken that shot of her. Then he’d come back here and dropped the envelope and made the phone call. Not from the pay phone, because that would have been traceable. A cell phone, maybe. She leaned over the answering machine, hit rewind and then play. As the tape played back, she heard traffic sounds in the background and some telltale static.

She stopped the machine, popped the microcassette out. He was on the road, on the move. He would have to be. He would be watching her, yes. If he were CIA, he would know how to plant bugs and cameras. But she didn’t think he’d had the time to do those things yet. He probably figured he could scare her enough to keep her on the straight and narrow until he had all his ducks in a row.

Fine.

She went to her room, saved the contents of the CD-ROM to her hard drive, just in case, then tucked the CD and the name badge into her pocket along with the tape and headed out of the house. It wouldn’t look unusual for her to walk to campus. She had classes today.

She wouldn’t pursue this and put her mother or her friends at risk. She had no doubt the man would carry out his threats and then some. No doubt at all. God knew the government had committed far more serious atrocities and gotten away with them. Especially if the accounts on that CD were true.

But she wouldn’t forget. And she would make sure she had plenty of copies of this evidence tucked away in various places. Because someday she would be older and in a position to blow the whistle. Someday when she was established, with a Ph.D. behind her name, and a law license and some clout of her own. Then she would demand some answers.

But not yet. Right now she was just Mad Maxie Stuart, the twenty-year-old college student with the big imagination.

Imagination my ass, she thought. If she had ever needed proof that the government was up to no good in her hometown, she had it now. If that bastard on the phone thought his threats would put her off the scent, he was wrong. His threats were like the validation that had always eluded her. She wasn’t a nut. She was right.

She had been right all along.

And she could be patient.