Burn: A Novel Read online

  Someone—and she had only two someones whom she suspected—had gotten his hands on her checkbook and written himself a check for twenty-five odd thousand. Dylan, or Jerry? It had to be one of them. They knew where she lived, and they were both determined to get something from her. They both wanted their cut of her good fortune, their fair share for—what? Breathing?

  She’d tagged Dylan for a moocher, but she wasn’t sure he’d steal. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be bold enough to take it all. He’d steal a few checks, write one here and there for a couple hundred dollars, hoping she wouldn’t notice, and if she did then he’d hope she’d cut him some slack instead of going to the cops. That was Dylan.

  But her dad … Jerry Redwine would take all he could get and then he’d run.

  She felt that inner door slam that signaled yet another end. She wouldn’t hear from him again. He wouldn’t call. There would be no more awkward lunches, no more offers to get in on the ground floor of some great opportunity he’d dreamed up. Her latest refusal had evidently convinced him she couldn’t be fleeced, so instead he’d stolen from her. He was gone for good this time, because he’d known there was no getting past this.

  The certainty that he was the culprit ate through her like acid. How had he done it? He couldn’t have gotten her ATM code—and besides, ATMs would dispense only a limited amount of cash from an account—but somehow he must have gotten his hands on her checkbook.

  She’d been so careful whenever he was in the house, always taking her purse with her if she went into another room, or locking it in the trunk of the car if she’d known ahead of time that he was coming over. But what if she hadn’t known he was there? What if he’d lurked outside, waited until she was in the shower or even in bed asleep, then quietly slipped the lock and let himself in? She could easily see him doing that. In hindsight she realized she should have installed an alarm, but she hadn’t wanted to spend any money on a place where she wasn’t going to be living much longer, and she’d let it slide. She was still in the habit of avoiding relatively small expenses, because they were outside her experience, and now it had cost her big time.

  When she got home she took out her checkbook and carefully went through it, looking at the numbers to make sure none were missing. The books each had twenty-five checks in them, and she kept only one book at a time; the others were in the safe deposit box. She knew what checks she’d written, because she kept a careful record. The blank check on top was the next one in sequence. They were all there … except for the very last one in the book.

  She looked up the last time she’d balanced the account, and carefully began subtracting the amount of each check she’d written. The total was more than she’d thought. She’d had a balance of twenty-seven thousand, four hundred three dollars and twenty-two cents. Jerry had even taken the four hundred. Heck, he’d evidently even done the math himself, to see how much he could write the check to himself for. If he hadn’t, if he’d left her a few hundred, it might have taken her days longer to realize what he’d done.

  And this was it. He’d finally done it, finally gone past her limit. This was turning out to be a hell of a day. First Michelle, and now Jerry, though actually Jerry had made his move first, even though she’d just found out about it. She hadn’t seen him since Wednesday. Two days, then. He’d have left immediately because he wouldn’t be certain she wouldn’t turn him over to the cops for forgery.

  She wouldn’t. Let him have the money. Let this mark the complete end. She’d been waiting for this moment from the second she realized she’d won the lottery, wondering how much it would cost her, and now she knew: twenty-seven thousand, four hundred dollars.

  She sat in the silent duplex, feeling exhausted and empty, and suddenly she had a moment of clarity. She’d known all along that winning the lottery would change her life, known that some of the changes would be jarring, but she hadn’t expected how complete the change would be.

  Part Two

  BAD LUCK

  Chapter Six

  Seven years later

  “WE HAVE A SITUATION DEVELOPING,” THE FAMILIAR voice said on Cael Traylor’s secure, encrypted cell phone.

  Cael could put both a name and a face to the voice, because he’d made a point of being able to do so. Finding out what he wanted to know had required a cross-country drive, but driving had kept him off the radar, which he wouldn’t have been if he’d flown. Any time his name showed up on a passenger list, certain elements of the U.S. government learned of it. Not Homeland Security, not the State Department, but certain people who handled black ops, such as the man who was currently talking to him on his phone.

  “Details,” he said briefly, turning off the television and wheeling away from his computer so he could concentrate. He didn’t take notes; a paper trail could come back to bite him on the ass. He did take precautions to make certain he was never hung out to dry, but notes weren’t part of his routine.

  “We’ve picked up some transmissions from the North Koreans that make us suspect they’ve established a source for some technology we’d rather they not have.”

  Cael didn’t ask what that technology was—not yet, anyway. At this point he didn’t need to know. If at some point he decided he did need to know, then he wouldn’t proceed without that information. “Who’s the source?”

  “Frank Larkin.”

  Cael’s interest level shot up several degrees. Larkin was a multimillionaire who was one of the behind-the-scene powers in Washington, D.C., with a lot of friends and contacts in high places. He had jumped on the green bandwagon with so-called environmentally friendly businesses and products that were questionable at best, and were probably outright cons. Cael didn’t get emotionally involved in causes, but in his opinion it took a particularly sleazy type of bastard to take advantage of people who were trying to do something good.

  “He pulls a lot of juice” was all he said, his tone neutral. Because of Larkin’s connections, anything they got on him would have to be ironclad—and even then there was no guarantee that anything would ever be done. On the other hand, in a lot of these cases no formal charges were ever brought. The “problem” was taken care of, and would look like a heart attack or a stroke, at least on paper, while the bullet hole in the back of the head would somehow escape the medical examiner’s notice.

  Cael had done his share of wet work, but that was for another country, in another decade. His true specialty was surveillance, so what he was being called on to do was get the goods on Larkin, not take him out.

  “Specifics,” he said.

  “Larkin is one of a consortium that’s expanding into luxury ship cruises. The first ship, the Silver Mist, is scheduled to go into service very shortly. Before that, however, her maiden voyage will be a special two-week charity cruise to Hawaii. The passengers will all be the super-elite, all the proceeds from the cruise will be donated to charity, and there’s a huge public relations push going on. Larkin will be the host of the cruise. We think he’ll be meeting with the North Koreans while he’s in Hawaii, but the place and time won’t be set until shortly beforehand. We need to know when and where.”

  Cael mulled that information over. The computer age had changed espionage; actual prototypes or products didn’t have to be stolen. Instead, the specs could be transmitted in the blink of an eye, and the receiving country or agency could proceed from there. The North Koreans were famously paranoid; a face-to-face meet, especially on foreign soil, posed far more risk to them than a simple file transmission.

  “Something’s off,” he said. “Why would the Koreans agree to that? Why the need for a face-to-face meet?”

  “We don’t know. There may be something else going on that we haven’t unraveled yet. What we do know is enough.”

  Cael gave a mental shrug. In the end, it didn’t matter why the Koreans would agree to such a risky move, just that they had. “When’s the cruise?”

  “Two weeks.”

  Not much time then. “Can you get me and my peop