Most Wanted (The Red Sky Conspiracy, Book 1) Read online

  “What about all those people at the nightclub?”

  “They saw a bunch of cops rush inside, but we got everyone out before all the real action happened. Most of them probably don’t spend more than a minute watching the news in a given week; they wouldn’t know who Porter was if he were standing in front of them, like he was last night.” He shrugged. “But it hasn’t even been a day yet. If Porter stays off the news for another twenty-four hours, I’d be shocked.”

  She clicked the TV off and laid the remote on the nightstand next to her. Except for the slight throbbing in her head and the inability to remember details from last night, the rest of her really did feel fine. Better than fine, actually. It hadn’t been like this when she first woke up this morning, but the hours and afternoon had been good to her.

  “Anyways, I hear the desk jockeys are putting you in for a commendation,” Pete was saying. That surprised her and it must have shown on her face, because Pete chuckled. “You’re a hero, Quinn.”

  “I lost my firearm to a terrorist,” Quinn said. “I’m also the reason he was able to keep HRT back and eventually escaped.”

  “He escaped because he blew a hole in the back of Ross’s office using the explosives Ross smuggled from God knows where into the country for him. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t even have been close to capturing him in the first place.”

  “I lost my firearm, Pete.”

  “It happens.”

  “Has it ever happened to you?”

  He started to answer, but stopped short and shook his head instead. “Not yet.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Just saying the words out loud somehow made it more real, and it had been pretty real before. But to hear it come out of her mouth, admitting her failures…

  Goddamn you, Porter. You bastard.

  “Did they find it?” she asked. “My gun?”

  “No,” Pete said. “Not yet.”

  “He took it with him?”

  “We think so.”

  “What about my phone? I wasn’t sure if he used it to call someone, or if he had his own.”

  “He must have used his. There were no extra calls on yours when we retrieved it from the rubble.”

  “Were you able to trace the call he made? We know his location and the time…”

  “No. If he called someone—”

  “He called someone, Pete. I heard him talking.”

  Pete nodded and gave her a reassuring smile. “The tech guys are working on it. Maybe it’s there somewhere and they just have to locate it.” He shrugged. “The suits didn’t tell you any of this?”

  “They didn’t tell me very much. They mostly just asked”—and asked and asked the same questions over and over—“and I answered what I could. You’re the only reason I know this much already, Pete. Thanks for coming.”

  “Miller and Danford wanted to tag along, but I pulled rank on them. We didn’t want to crowd your room. Hell, we thought you’d be…”

  “Half-dead?”

  “In worse shape,” Pete finished. “But look at you. I was worried for nothing.”

  “It’s the drugs. I’m pretty sure they doped me up when they brought me here last night, then later when I took a nap after Ben left.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Pete said. Then, “Anyways.”

  She smiled. Anyways was a Pete trademark, which was odd coming from a thirty-nine-year-old Special Agent of the FBI. But it also made him very likeable, not that she needed more reasons to like the man.

  Oh, give it a rest, she thought, and said, “Is Ben out there looking for him? Porter?”

  “Ben, the unit, the entire might of the FBI, essentially. Everything except calling in help from local law enforcement, but that’s coming soon, I’m sure. Like I said, we’ll be lucky if this media blackout lasts for another twenty-four hours. It’s not just us, either. Homeland, CIA, DIA—all the alphabet agencies are sending people.”

  “That’s a lot of people…”

  “And none of it would have been possible without you, Quinn. Last night was the closest we’ve come to catching him in five years.”

  “And I blew it.”

  “You gave us an opportunity. I wouldn’t exactly call that blowing it.”

  “He took my gun, Pete. He took my gun.”

  Pete sighed. “I know.”

  “I’m never going to live that down. My career…”

  “Will be fine,” Pete said. “But you’re right; you’re probably never going to live that down. The only thing you can do is try to overcome it.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “We’ve all got skeletons in our closet, Quinn. The best you can do is try to jam in more good stuff until the bad stuff gets shoved way, way into the back and people don’t notice it so easily anymore. So yeah, you screwed up, but you also did pretty damn good for a junior agent barely three months out of the academy, if you ask me.”

  She pursed a smile at him. It was the best she could manage, because as much as she wanted to believe him, to accept his defense of her, she couldn’t shake the knowledge that she had lost her gun to a terrorist, and no amount of justification was going to make that untrue.

  But Quinn said anyway, “Thanks, Pete. That means a lot to me.”

  He nodded. “I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

  “Thanks,” she said again, because she didn’t know what else to say. If it were Ben telling her these things, she could have expressed her feelings better, but this wasn’t Ben. And as much as she liked Pete Ringo, it wasn’t the same.

  “You told the suits that he used your phone?” Pete was asking her.

  She nodded. “To talk to Ben.”

  “But then he called someone else, with his own phone. Do you remember what he said?”

  She thought about it, but like this morning, nothing came. “I don’t remember anything he said after or before he told me to get down.”

  “It’ll come back to you. A day, maybe a few days. It’s going to take time after what you went through.”

  “I hope so. I don’t like not remembering, Pete.”

  “Who does?”

  If only you knew, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. She liked Pete, but Ben was the only person who really knew her best, knew all about the dark times in her life before he set her straight, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  She said instead, “Back at the academy, when we would run down the Most Wanted list, a few of the recruits didn’t think he was real.”

  “Porter?”

  “Uh huh. They thought he was a made-up bogeyman. I mean, we saw the news footages, the case files, all the reports about the things he’d done for the last five years since he left American soil. But there was never any actual footage of him committing those crimes.”

  “No, but there were plenty of eyewitnesses. He left a lot of widows and orphans in his wake.”

  “Right. Eyewitnesses. And we know how dependable those are.”

  Pete gave her a half-curious, half-amused look. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m just telling you what some of us used to think back at Quantico.”

  “How closely did you study him?”

  “Not that closely. At least, not closer than anyone else. The one thing about him that struck me—and stayed with me—was that he was an orphan.”

  “You were an orphan too, weren’t you?”

  She nodded and thought of Ben. “It’s funny how things work out…”

  “How so?”

  “I became an FBI agent to catch criminals, while Porter decided to be an anarchist and kill people.”

  There but for the grace of God, Quinn thought.

  Then, with a smile, Or Ben Foster.

  Pete left about an hour later, and Quinn was surprised she was glad he was gone. She liked him—maybe a little too much—but there was something else on her mind, something she couldn’t get a handle on because her memory still wasn’t coop
erating.

  It was what Porter had said on his phone, and the fact that he had taken the time to make a call during a hostage situation. What had he said? She couldn’t remember. She’d told the interrogators this morning the same thing and they had asked her the same question over and over, sometimes two times in a row, other times coming back to it like her memory would have returned by then. It hadn’t.

  The not knowing gnawed at her, and she had been thinking about it all through Pete’s visit. When he finally left her to the peace and quiet (and semidarkness) of the room, she was able to relax physically and mentally. Not having Pete here, not having two people who she didn’t know throwing one question after another at her with Ben watching over them and her made a world of difference.

  Slowly, very slowly, fragments of memory came back to her.

  Porter, behind her, the feel of the (my) gun against the back of her neck. The adrenaline coursing through her, the sound of Gary whimpering in the corner—

  “…didn’t go as planned…”

  There.

  Words that formed a sentence, except she could only hear a part of it.

  “…didn’t go as planned…” Porter had said after making the call.

  She glanced over at the hospital phone on the nightstand next to her and thought about ringing the nurse outside and getting an outside line to Pete. He would be on his way home right now and could easily turn around—

  Ben. If there was anyone she should call, it would be Ben.

  Except she didn’t. She didn’t have enough to tell him. How were four words—four seemingly random words that were part of a larger, more coherent sentence that she couldn’t recall—going to help Ben find and capture Porter?

  “…didn’t go as planned…”

  She pulled her hand away from the phone. The nurse who had come in after Pete took his leave had left the soft lights on, but Quinn looked past that now and at the blank white wall across the room.

  “…didn’t go as planned…” Porter had said.

  Four words. That was all she could remember. Four measly words that didn’t make any sense without context.

  Something hadn’t gone as planned. What? The pickup with Ross? That was probably it. Or maybe Porter was referring to something else. That was possible, too. In absence of the rest of the sentence, anything was possible. That was the problem.

  She knew one thing: It had to be important, because why else would Porter take the time during a hostage situation with the FBI to make the call?

  “…didn’t go as planned…”

  Four words. That was all she had.

  At least it was something. Better than the zero from this morning, anyway.

  Bullshit. Four lousy words that mean nothing.

  She ground her teeth and was still doing it when the nurse came back inside to record her machines’ readings. “You feeling okay? Need something for the pain?”

  Quinn shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you need something. That call button isn’t for show.”

  Quinn gave the nurse a forced smile when she noticed the look on the other woman’s face. “What is it? Something wrong?”

  “Just that your vitals are good,” the nurse said.

  “And that’s bad?”

  “I mean, they’re really good.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  The nurse glanced down at the chart in her hands, then flipped through the pages. “You were in an accident last night? Some kind of building collapse?”

  On top of me, yeah, she thought, but remembered what the interrogators had told her this morning, that Gary Ross’s nightclub was still classified, and said instead, “Something like that. Why?”

  “Does anything hurt? Describe your pain on a scale from one to ten. Ten being the most severe.”

  “Two. It’s pretty much all contained in my head.”

  “Headache?”

  “It comes and goes, but yeah.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “Better than this morning. I don’t know what you guys gave me, but it’s doing its job. What did you guys give me, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Someone must have given you something earlier, but it’s not on the chart.” She wrinkled her nose as if she had an itch she couldn’t scratch. “Give me a moment. I’m going to get in touch with Rene from this morning. She’ll know.”

  Quinn watched the woman leave the room and waited for her to come back.

  Ten minutes, then thirty, until Quinn eventually forgot about the odd conversation and her mind was, once again, filled with Porter.

  “…didn’t go as planned…” he had said into the phone.

  What? What hadn’t gone as planned?

  If only she could remember the rest of that one-sided conversation. It was important. She knew that much. And if it had been important enough for Porter to risk making it at the time, knowing that the FBI had the potential to trace it...

  If only she could remember the rest of it.

  If only, if only…

  …she hadn’t lost her gun to a terrorist.

  If only, if only…

  “Wake up, Quinn. Wake up!”

  There were people in her room.

  What were the nurses doing back so soon?

  No, not nurses.

  These people didn’t move like nurses, or act as if they belonged.

  There were three of them. Shadowy forms that gathered around her bed. For some reason she had trouble focusing on them despite their close proximity. She could practically feel the heat of their bodies as they moved around her.

  And yet, and yet, she had difficulty focusing.

  What was happening to her?

  Her eyelids were heavy and she wanted desperately to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. Her arms and legs were like tree trunks, somehow rooted to the bed; she couldn’t move them even an inch, though she had some feelings in her fingers and toes.

  Some, but not a lot.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but the only sound that came out was a mild wheeze.

  “Don’t fight it,” a voice said. It was male and comforting. “You’ll only strain yourself. Let go. Just let go.”

  She believed the voice and let go. It was easy, and the results were welcoming.

  Quinn blinked against the figure standing at the foot of her bed. A second one had retreated toward the door and disappeared into the shadows. The third one had—

  Where had the third intruder gone?

  “We’re here to help you remember, Quinn,” the figure at the foot of her bed said. The man was wearing a black blazer and slacks, and for a moment she thought it was Porter having come back to finish the job.

  But it wasn’t Porter.

  The shape was wrong—the shoulders weren’t quite as broad, and though her perspective was warped by lying flat on her back, Quinn could tell the man wasn’t as tall as Porter had been.

  Plus there was something very wrong with his face. It seemed to be moving, as if she were watching someone on a TV screen instead of in person, except the image kept flickering back and forth and side to side. A constant never idle blurring of skin and eyes and nose and lips.

  I’m dreaming. This is a nightmare. That’s all it is. A nightmare.

  “The nightclub,” the man said. “Think back to the nightclub, Quinn. Remember?”

  “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know why she answered. She shouldn’t be answering questions from a man without a face.

  And yet she was.

  “Good. Good,” the man said. “Now, remember Porter? Remember spotting him across the club?”

  “Yes…” she said quickly, without thinking.

  Why was she answering questions from a stranger in her hospital room? A stranger without a face? No, that wasn’t true. He had a face—after all, where would his voice be coming out of if he didn’t?—it was just that she could
n’t make it out because it kept moving, blurring back and forth, and side to side…

  What a strange nightmare. Because that’s all this is. A nightmare…

  “Watching him as he goes into the office?” the man said.

  “Yes…”

  “Now, approaching the office. Then entering. Porter is there.”

  “Yes. He’s there.” Her voice was dreamy even to her own ears. “He sees me. He recognizes me. I have to act.”

  “What happens then?”

  “The dress. It’s slowing me down. He’s got my gun. He’s got my gun.”

  “The phone, Quinn. Who did Porter call on his phone while you were in the office with him?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say a name.”

  “But he spoke into the phone.”

  “Yes…”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember…”

  “Concentrate, Quinn. What did Porter say into the phone?”

  “…didn’t go as planned…”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Concentrate. What else did Porter say into the phone while you were in the room with him last night?”

  She didn’t know why the man was asking her the same question she had been asking herself over and over again. If she knew, wouldn’t she have told the suits earlier this morning? Wouldn’t she have told Ben? If she knew, wouldn’t she have—

  There!

  “‘It’s me,’” Quinn said.

  “Who is ‘me?’” the man asked.

  “That’s what he said. Porter. ‘It’s me.’ Into the phone.”

  “Good. Good. What else did he say?”

  “‘Things didn’t go as planned. You’ll have to proceed without me. I know. Good luck.’”

  She didn’t know how but it was suddenly there, Porter’s entire one-sided conversation clear as day inside her head.

  How was this possible?

  “What didn’t go as planned, Quinn?” the man without a face asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing. He hung up.”

  “Did he say anything else after that?”

  “No…”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes…”

  “Are you sure, Quinn?”

  “I…”