T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

Eric waited through three tight breaths, then slipped out and raced into the night.

Monday

Evening’s approach found Jackie wondering if perhaps the search of her old university books was merely a quest for fables. Eric’s silence only compounded the lack of solutions. And she missed Wynn. The fact that she was even admitting to such an emotion left her battered by all that might still happen.

She carried her laptop out into the darkness and softly closed the balcony door behind her. An earlier rain had cleared, leaving the air warm and windless and filled with the chorale of tropical springtime. The surrounding Florida oaks were twisted Chinese etchings upon a wash of stars and moonlight. Jackie turned her chair so that she was staring out over the treetops toward the north. All evening she had heard hints of churchbells fading into the distance. Now she sat and sipped at her mug and mourned how time and distance were already blurring her Roman memories. The questions she had asked herself in Rome and the faint awakenings of new hope were too fine to let slip away. She flipped open the cover of her laptop and began a new file. One she simply called Essential .

She stopped only when fatigue stripped her words of meaning. The wind rose with the night, whispering in the language of trees and nightbirds that such thoughts were too vital to be addressed with a sleepy heart. She closed the laptop, stretched, and felt as good about the hour as she had in a long time. She was not finished. In fact, she had scarcely begun. But admitting there was reason enough to remember, and to question, was the biggest step she had taken in years.

Jackie was so dead asleep, she thought at first the sound came from thunder. Then the house trembled about her, and once again she was faced with a fear she could not handle. Terror tossed her from her bed and slammed her into the side wall with the accuracy of a catapult. She tumbled to the floor and landed hard on something plastic, cracking it into shreds. She shook the stars from her eyes and crawled to her kitchen, where she pulled a drawer down on top of her, making all the noise of a construction site in full swing. Which left her no choice but to scream, “I’ve got a gun!”

“Stop, hey, no!” The shadow silhouetted against the dawn screamed almost as loud and certainly as high as she had. “It’s me!”

“Eric?” She managed to scramble over close enough to see the young-old features through her screen door. Relief surged into an anger so strong she could have stabbed him through the wire. “Do you have any idea how you just scared me?”

“Join the club. Put down that knife, will you? And let me in.”

Her fingers made hard going of the hook. “You’ve got it?”

“Where’s the letter from Shane?”

“Wait a second.” She turned on the light, walked back to her desk, and pulled out the envelope from beneath her laptop. On the floor by the alcove she saw the shards of what had formerly been her cellphone. “You really have the code?”

“Put down that knife, okay? Yeah, I’ve got it.” He flapped open a sheet of paper, his features bloodless. “But this is it, right? No more contacts, no changing your mind. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“Yes.” She made the exchange. Studied the scant notations. “This is all I need?”

“Long as you know what you’re doing.” He opened the envelope, gave it a quick read, and said bitterly, “If the drunk remembers me or that other guy puts two and two together, I’m dead meat.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind. What’s important is I don’t have to see you again. Am I right?”

“Far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

“You won’t tell Hayek?”

“Not a word.”

“Right.” He started toward the door, then added, “The numbers may be coded. You know, the first three digits one number forward, the next three back. That’s what I do. And be careful when you access the computer, it may have a silent alarm that goes off if the wrong codes are put in. We had a guy use the previous quarter’s code once. Security swarmed.”

Jackie followed Eric outside, watched him tumble down the stairs and hurry away. She lowered herself onto the top step, massaging the place on her forehead where she had slammed into the wall. Like it or not, she needed to find herself a bolt-hole. A few more terror attacks like this and there wouldn’t be anything left for Hayek to mangle.

Tuesday

The next morning, Colin arrived at Hayek’s headquarters two hours earlier than normal. Vague desires and shattered dreams had chased him from his apartment and driven with him down gray and empty lanes. He sat in the parking lot and yearned for a world he had only known within Lisa’s gaze.

The day had begun on a miserable note. Unable to sleep, he had done his regular scan of Havilland’s files just before six, only to find himself assaulted from the most unexpected direction. Fury had launched him from his chair, leaving him pulling his hair and shouting silent epitaphs against Havilland, against Lisa, against this benighted place and time.

Jackie Havilland had opened a new file called Essentials . It was as if Lisa had reached across space and time to strike a final blow. Somehow Jackie Havilland had arrived at the same point as Lisa and begun to ask the same questions. He could not shrug this off as mere coincidence. The enigma could not be so comfortably dismissed. Fate’s blind hand could not simply have plucked two such unlikely people and hurled them into the darkness, only to have them both come to the same conclusion. Colin had stared at the pilfered words on his screen and found pure agony in Jackie Havilland’s desperate wish to hold this same impossible vision.

Now as he walked through the overcast dawn, he yearned not for whispers but the voice of a woman who once had spoken to him of timeless love. A voice so melodious it had merely to breathe into his ear for him to hear the chant of ages and music from the stars. Her absence left him confronted by his own emptiness in all its skeletal horror.

He was almost relieved to enter the front office and be confronted by a day already running at hypertense speed. Alex and the barrel-chested derivatives trader stood by the reception desk, talking with a gray-suited man Colin had never seen before. Every seat in the foyer was taken by senior traders. All eyes were on him. Tight gazes, tense features. Faces from the floor.

Alex waved him over. “Want you to meet Thorson Fines. Chief of the Capital Markets division over at First Florida. This is our resident e-guru, Colin Ready.”

Without looking over, Thorson gave him the sort of onetime up-and-down handshake traders reserved for people not of their tribe, and thus below their contempt. “Right.”

Alex kept him there because Fines wanted him gone. “We all got calls from the pickle woman. You know who I mean?”

Colin nodded. Hayek’s secretary.

“She woke us up at a quarter to five. Wasn’t it about then, Barry?”

“You got me,” the derivatives man replied, eyeing Fines as he would a fish dead far too long. “All I know is, the phone sounded like the gong of doom.”

Fines spoke up then. “What, we’re filling in the backroom gophers now? Letting them know we’re here on what I was told is highly confidential business?”

“Miss Prunella sounded like she’d been at her desk for hours.” Alex ignored Fines’ comment entirely. “The lady probably mainlines coffee at midnight, just keeps chugging along. She goes, ’Mr. Hayek will see you promptly at half-past six. Be ready.’ As if I always go upstairs with my pants at half-mast. Ready for what, I ask her. But the old dear had already plunked down the phone.”