"Airport."
"Why?"
"Something Craine said. I'll explain when I can."
"Brock." His voice dropped, urgent now. "Listen to me. The airport's outside our reach. You understand? We can't fly anything out there—no birds, no drones, it's restricted airspace, the FAA owns that sky and they do not let us play in it. We've got no eyes past the perimeter and no way to put any there fast. You drive out to that airport, you are on your own. Completely. Nobody covering you."
"That's fine," I said. "I work better alone, anyway."
"Damn it, that's not—" I heard him grab for calm. "At least, let me scramble a ground team, give me twenty minutes to get?—"
"Tommy." I cut clean through it. "What is Project Trueborn?"
The line went dead quiet.
Not dropped. Quiet. The silence of a man who's just had the floor pulled out from under him and is deciding, fast, how to land. I'd heard that silence on him twice already today and I knew it now.
"Where did you hear that?" he said finally. Careful. So careful. "Is that—is that what Craine wanted?"
"That's what Craine wanted. That and a couple other things." I didn't tell him the first demand—Dominion Hall going dark, all of it—because I wasn't ready to hand my brother the whole of what I was carrying. But I gave him the one that mattered. "He wants Dad, Tommy. He wants me to deliver our father to him." A beat. "And I'm thinking about it."
"You don't mean that."
"I mean every word."
"Brock—"
"I sat in a car this afternoon with a man I buried in my own heart years ago," I said, and my voice came out flat and hard, the way it does when the alternative is coming apart. "A man you, apparently, knew was breathing. So, don't tell me what I don't mean. How long, Tommy? How long have you known he was alive?"
A pause. "Not long. And it's—" He stopped.
"Don't," I said. "Don't you say it."
"It's complicated, Brock."
I laughed, and there was nothing in it. "Yeah. There it is. Funny how it's alwayscomplicatedright when a man doesn't want to do the work of explaining himself. I've noticed that. All over the world, every language—it's complicatedmeansI'm not going to tell you."
"That's not fair."
"Maybe not. We'll find out." I watched the mile markers strobe past. "We're gonna deal with all of it, little brother. Youand me and Dad and that fortress and every secret you've all been sitting on. But I'll tell you now, it is not going to be pretty when we do."
I ended the call before he could answer and put my foot down.
The Bugatti was built for exactly one thing and I finally let it do that thing. The needle climbed and the world narrowed to a tunnel and the highway came at me like water out of a hose. I ate it up, threading the Sunday traffic at speeds that turned the other drivers into smears of stunned faces. A hundred. A hundred and ten. The armored weight that made it sluggish off the line meant nothing now—at speed the thing just hunkered down and flew, glued to the road, doing the one job in the world it was good for, same as me.
Time was ticking. I felt every second of it.
I tried her again. Hit her name and put it on speaker and got three rings and then her voice, recorded, cheerful and ordinary—you've reached Mary Catherine, please leave a message after the tone—and the tone, and nothing. Straight through to it the time after that. Phone off, or dead, or in a bag in a trunk on the way to a gate.
And I couldn't have told you, flying down that interstate, what exactly I was racing toward. Whether I was trying to keep her safe from Craine, who'd dangled her in front of me like bait and surely hadn't done it for my benefit. Whether I was trying to stop her from walking into a lawyer's office and making this whole mess worse for everybody, herself included. Or whether—and I hated this one, hated that it was in there at all—whether I just couldn't stand the picture of her in a car with Daniel Whitaker, the ex, my competition.
I didn't sort it out. I let the question sit there unanswered and I drove the car right on the edge of wrecking it, because, at least, the edge was a thing I understood.
The airport signs came up green out of the sprawl and I let off the gas for the first time, riding the offramp down into the terminal loop. It wasn't packed, thank God—Sunday afternoon, a lull between the morning rush and the evening one.
I'd have given a lot for the old days. When a man could walk straight through an airport to the gate with no ticket and no badge, meet his people right where they stepped off the plane. A bunch of murdering cowards in 2001 had killed that for good. Now, you couldn't get past a velvet rope without a boarding pass and a strip search. So, the gate was out. I did the next best thing.
I came around the loop and pulled hard up to the departures curb, where the cars unload, where a man on foot could see the garages and the crosswalks and everybody moving between them.
