F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

There. He’d looked at her again. Her gut tingled with alarm. No question: He was watching her.

How could they have found her? Her practice of switching log-in locations guaranteed a different IP address every time, and her random choice of location made it impossible to predict where she’d be.

Well, not literally impossible, but virtually impossible.

She’d sensed they might be looking for her, but never dreamed they were this close.

The café, already small and cramped, seemed to shrink.

Her practice was to situate herself in a rear corner with her back to a wall so no one could read over her shoulder. But that was working against her now. She wished she were closer to the front, nearer the door.

Keeping her fingers moving and her head perfectly still, she flicked her gaze back and forth. The coffee bar sat against the far wall; to her right, the restroom—“Customers Only”—and an “Employees Only” door leading who knew where; the front door to Amsterdam Avenue lay all the way across the café to her left. Through the windows she could see people whisking by in the bright July sunshine.

“Another?”

She jumped at the voice, then realized it was the waiter. Where had he come from? She glanced up at him—certainly no older than his late teens. He looked underfed and overtired. A college kid maybe?

She forced a smile as she nodded. “Why, yes. I do believe I will.”

She liked to indulge herself in these cafés, usually with a mocha latte—she was expected to buy something, so she might as well enjoy it—but only one. But today a second cup might prove useful. Make it look as if she intended to stay awhile.

While she waited, she put the time to good use by uploading the rest of her posts. She’d just hit ENTER on the last when the waiter returned.

“Hang on,” she said as he placed the cup on the table. She handed him a bill. “Here. I may have to leave on short notice. Keep the change.”

He looked at it, then her. “This is a twenty.”

“I know.” She understood his confusion: The tip was more than the coffees. “You look like you could use it.”

He gave her a self-conscious smile. “Yeah. Thanks.”

As he wandered away, she glanced into her virtually empty bag. She kept no ID of any sort on her person. Cash, a few toiletries, a pay-as-you-go cell phone, the keys to her three front door locks—that was it. No one could be allowed to know where she lived, because that was where she kept her proof, all the documentation for what she knew to be true. It had taken her years to assemble it and she doubted she’d ever be able to do so again. She couldn’t allow it to fall into the wrong hands.

With a start she noticed her stalker rise from his seat and amble her way. She stiffened as her heart rate jumped. What was he doing? Was he going to speak to her?

No, he passed without a look and stepped into the restroom.

The not-looking was a giveaway. A casual patron would have glanced her way. Or would he?

She sighed and slumped in her seat. Maybe this was all in her head. God knew she’d been told often enough she was crazy—starting in her teens and continuing through the rest of her life. Maybe they were all right. Maybe—

No. She couldn’t allow herself to think like that. She knew some of the truth and had to put what she knew out there, to stimulate others to help her look for the rest of it.

She also knew that blond man had been watching her. Her second cup of coffee had lulled him into thinking he could take a bathroom break.

Wrong.

She straightened and rushed through her routine of deleting cookies and erasing her browser history. It wouldn’t stop anyone really serious about finding out what she’d been up to, but would foil run-of-the-mill snooping. She pulled her flash drive from the USB port and shoved it into a pocket. Normally she’d delete everything, then fill the drive to capacity with junk—overwriting all the memory—then delete all that to make sure none of her original files were recoverable, but no time for that now.

She rose and hurried toward the door.

Outside she paused and looked around. The air-conditioning in the café had been set a little too low for her and the hot air on the sidewalk felt good. The nearest corner lay to her right so she headed that way at a trot. The sooner she was out of sight of the café, the better.

She’d broken a little sweat by the time she rounded the corner. Out of shape. Well, what else could she expect from a sedentary life spent reading from either a page or a monitor?

She glanced back. No one following.

She slowed her pace. Had she lost him? Had she truly had anybody to lose?

Even if she’d been wrong, she’d just had a good drill on staying alert. She couldn’t allow herself to become complacent. Not with what she knew.

Another glance back and she almost tripped over her own sneakers as the blond man rushed into sight at the corner. He stopped, looking around. His movements seemed jerky, almost frantic.

As if desperately looking for someone.

She wasn’t imagining it. He was after her.

Panicked, she ran blindly. She cut toward the street and felt someone grab her arm.

Another!

She twisted free and increased her speed. If anything happened to her, her brother would check her house and read the note . . . the note that told him to contact Jack.

3

“All right, lissen up.”

Jack stood on the Lexington Avenue sidewalk with a dozen typically scruffy Kickers and pretended to pay attention as Darryl gave them their marching orders. Darryl’s scraggly brown hair had grown longer as he’d grown progressively thinner over the past couple of months. He didn’t look well, but he was as enthusiastic as ever as he handed out the sample chapters of Hank Thompson’s bestseller, Kick .

Jack always saw him around on his regular visits to the Lodge. Hadn’t ever spoken to him, but he didn’t seem a bad guy. Thompson’s gofer. Kind of the Jar Jar Binks of the local Kicker enclave.

His first encounter with Darryl had been in the basement of the Kickers’ borrowed clubhouse back in May on the night all hell had broken loose. Jack had been clean-shaven then and had had a foot planted in Darryl’s back. No way he’d ever recognize him today.

“Now,” Darryl said as he scratched his arm with his free hand, “I think you’ve all been here before, so you all should know the drill. But just in case one of you’s a newbie, here’s how we play it. We’re gonna go across the street and stand in front of the Dormie building there and hand this sample chapter of the boss’s book to anyone going in or coming out.”

Jack stared at the art deco front of the Dormentalist Temple on the far side of Lexington and scratched his new beard. Relatively new. It had filled in nicely since he’d stopped shaving a couple of months ago. He’d needed to change his appearance and it had worked. With his hair cut short—not much longer now than his beard—he looked like a different person.

Thompson, the Kicker leader, was the reason. Their last meeting had not gone Thompson’s way. Nothing he’d like better than to extract a little payback from Jack’s hide. He’d probably spread his description among his followers, so Jack wasn’t taking any chances.

He glanced down at the faux tattoo on the thumb web of his left hand.

Thanks to Gia’s deft touch with a black Sharpie, he looked like a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool Kicker.

“You can’t miss the Dormie members,” Darryl was saying. “They got the Michael Jackson jackets on.”