Michael: The Mark (Airel Saga Book Four)

Chapter I

U.S. Highway 97, Oregon—Present Day

THE DUST HAD LONG ago settled from the landing, and the white FBI helo sat immobile with its pilot just off the unusable roadway. The wreckage of the accident under investigation was strewn in lumps and shards more or less in a parallel line nearby.

It was a good decision, she thought, playing the federal investigation card. Gretchen was glad that she had dismissed the local yokels and cordoned off the scene as soon as she had landed.

But there were anomalies. Unexplainable things. Like this enormous dent in the middle of the road, FBI agent Gretchen Reid mused. "Holy ... look at these cracks in the asphalt, how deep ..." she said to no one. Harry, whom she valued both for his usefulness and despised for his subservience, trailed her around, his weak hands trembling a little as he wrung them together at his waist, picking his way carefully, awkwardly, over and through the debris.

Gretchen lifted her pretty head and looked around, assessing the situation. There was the log truck just up the road, with Rawlins' car, or what remained of it, pinned underneath. Then, in the opposite direction on a line that passed through the dent in the road, the black SUV. Or what remained of it. She made the calculations in her head, sizing it up. At first blush, it would appear that either the SUV or the log truck had crossed the double yellow and caused the wreck. Probably the SUV, because Rawlins had gotten too close, too obvious, and spooked the young man Michael Alexander. He triggers a high-speed chase; Rawlins foolishly engages the youth. Youth then crashes and burns. Stupid. I wouldn't have done that. The youth, driving at triple-digit speeds in the dark and in the rain, lost control.

"And caused the accident?" Again, said to no one.

Harry, still wringing his hands, met her eyes for a moment, and she saw something there that didn't fit. But she let it pass, moving on.

The SUV had hit the log truck head on. No. Not possible; it wouldn't have landed way over there, she thought, estimating the distance from where she stood to the SUV at about five-hundred feet. No, that wasn't possible. After all, just look at what happened to Rawlins. Pancake city. No, something didn't fit.

"It's almost like it was thrown," she said. How could it have been thrown? Her hunch, that there was more to this incident than met the eye, was beginning to be borne out by events. She stood there in the silence, gusts of wind whipping at her hair, plastering her pantsuit to her athletic body, tugging at the fabric like jealous hands.

She turned around again. Harry had turned his back to her, looking off at the distance, his hand in his jacket pocket as if searching for a stick of gum, perhaps his eReader thing. Once more, she looked down at the dent in the road's surface. Then, with alarm she realized she hadn't been seeing what was right in front of her. This isn't a dent. It's dents, plural. There were two. Side by side, like—feet. That's when she knew what she had been missing. Whatever had caused this accident ... had fled the scene?

"Impossible," she breathed, looking down, wide-eyed.

Harry turned and she looked up. As he squared his body to her, his hand came out of his jacket. He brought it together with its opposite, raising them up. She then realized that his stance was all too familiar: that of an enemy gunman. And there in those hands was his pistol, real enough.

"Say good-bye, Gretchen."

"That's impossible—" The last sound she heard was only the first of two shots; a double tap that exploded her head like a coconut breaking open.

***

HARRY PUT HIS PISTOL, an original Colt 1911A1 .45, back in his shoulder holster. "Hollow-points, Gretchen. Double tap to the head." He kicked her lifeless body lightly, playfully. "Bet you didn't see that coming." He laughed aloud. "Oh, well. Maybe, actually, you did. At least the first shot, anyway."

In the distance, the helo began to start up, the metallic whine of its single turbine climbing in pitch. The pilot, assigned to Harry and not working for Gretchen or even the FBI, had known what the signal would be, and he was waiting for it. Harry knelt alongside Gretchen's body in the double depression of the "dents" in the road, the cause of which he had known full well, and all along. He placed a small RFID device down inside one of the cracks, below the surface of the road, and walked away.

Shortly, with Harry aboard, the helicopter took to flight, climbing. It hovered over the scene at an altitude of 1,000 feet. The pilot depressed the "pickle switch," a euphemism for the button that deploys munitions. A cylindrical device the size of a five-pound sack of flour released from the belly of the aircraft and fell. A retarder, like a miniature parachute, deployed from its tail, slowing its descent and homing it in on the RFID beacon Harry had planted in the road. The helo banked sharply and headed southeast at maximum speed.

When the bomb hit the ground, it plonked dully, nonmetallically into the tarmac, its nose deforming and absorbing most of the force of the impact, causing the bomb to stick to the ground on the spot where it landed. Inside the canister, a kinetic firing pin pierced a thick membrane. Inside the membrane was a small amount of the chemical ethylenediamine, and as it mixed with the nitromethane that filled the rest of the bomb's canister, a violent explosion erupted. The two "dents" in the road were now an enormous single crater.

As for the rest of the "evidence," i.e. Gretchen Reid's body, it was engulfed, ablaze, torn apart and ejected in millions of fragments from the crater in a radius of more than six hundred feet. Harry smiled when the shockwave passed through him in midair. He sang a chilling little song: "Good-bye, Gretchen. Good-bye."