Firebolt

Chapter 1 –––––––– It had already been raining for three days by the time I settled in to my hiding place among the dark trees at the edge of David Zinn’s northern California vacation property. The armed guard walking quietly back and forth in front of the glass sliding doors that led out to his swimming pool was a cause for concern, but I was at least as worried about the possibility of a sudden mudslide from the forested slope behind me. A stakeout was nothing new to me, but the random chaos of nature was another matter. Nature can be an ally, though. She can help you hide, taking advantage of those natural mental weaknesses that leave the average person vulnerable. You don’t worry about being robbed in a driving rain storm. When the water is gushing down the gutters and flooding the crosswalks, the robbers are all at home in bed with a mug of hot chocolate. You don’t worry about your enemies when it’s been raining for three straight days. No matter who they are or how much they hate you, they will surely let it drop until the weather clears. It’s the sort of assumption that makes your target relax, that makes your bodyguard just a little less vigilant. Except there I was, crouching under a dark tarp in the shadows beneath the huge and ancient trees, with a pair of night vision binoculars, watching. A thousand years ago – a thousand lifetimes – I was staking out some fleabag motel room on the outskirts of Washington, DC with my late lamented partner Jim Duffy. We were trying to get a handle on a terrorist bank robbery crew called Ultima Thule, which was really more of a cult led by a would-be Pol Pot known only as Father. And then it all went to hell, and Duffy died, and it was all my fault for complicated reasons. I got transferred out to the FBI’s residential agency in Hennington, Minnesota while the Bureau sorted out just how much personal responsibility they thought I had in the matter. The irony of it all was that I was much guiltier than they would ever realize, since Duffy’s murderer had been hiding out at my house for days while I stupidly tried to save her from the consequences of her own actions. Duffy got a bullet, I got the blame, and as for Jackie Cole... she got all the cult’s money and disappeared. All the disciplinary actions in the entire history of the FBI would not have balanced out the scales for that one. While I was in exile, I befriended a professor at the university in Hennington who called himself Andrew Mann, and I started to fall for a grad student he worked with named Astrida Wright, who shared the professor’s interests in alchemy and other obscure subjects. That went bad too, so bad it is now known as the Hennington Incident. My actions in the Hennington Incident would not bear scrutiny, but the FBI didn’t know much about what I’d really been up to in Minnesota – trying to hunt down Father and kill him, that is. The Federal government, like every other government, believes in revenge only when it is the one doing the avenging. I do not share this ideology. On the road down below, two shining headlights appeared. They looked like eyes, the eyes of a predator glimmering in the night. But the person approaching in the car was not the predator in this situation. I watched from the trees with my binoculars, needing a clear and unequivocal identification before I could move in on my target. I had never met the man, so I had to identify him based on photos and video only. I couldn’t see into the back seat, but as the car pulled into the driveway, the guard at the back of the house walked out front to meet whoever it was. The driver parked and got out, then went back to open the rear door – a VIP, then. They were all rushing around, all flustered. The rain was heavy, and nobody wanted to be out in it, and nobody believed there would be a real threat on such a night. The bodyguard glanced around the perimeter in a cursory way, but he was clearly just checking off an item on a mental checklist – not really looking. I waited and watched. The man who got out of the car had one of those perfectly coiffed hipster beards, that tech-bro look complete with a shirt the color of Tikka Masala and a very expensive-looking pair of skin-hugging slacks. The driver was holding an umbrella up over his head so not a single unavoidable drop of water would stain the great man’s shirt. I glimpsed at his face, and immediately came out from under my tarp and began to quickly move in across the dark field while they attended to their employer’s needs. The roaring sound of the rainstorm drowned out my approach, and the bodyguard never even glanced back in my direction. I was crouching silently behind the pool shed by the time he turned around again. I was close to my goal, but the sordid heaviness of the whole thing started to get to me. I was once an FBI agent, a man with a respected career, an officially certified Good Guy. Now I was hiding in a drenching rainstorm outside of a scared man’s house after my very public firing and repudiation. I could quite easily die in the next few minutes, or be forced to take the life of an innocent man. That was my life now. So be it. I eased a nine millimeter handgun out of its holster, shielding it from the rain beneath my coat. I chambered a round as slowly and quietly as possible. It was time, and if I or anyone else at this house had to die tonight, then no one would cry about it. We all make choices. Most of my choices are bad ones, and that no longer bothers me.