Graveyard Shift by Michael F. Haspil

Author:Michael F. Haspil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

19

4:51 A.M.

Alex’s gut was not letting things go this time.

He could hit home, grab some essentials, and be gone. He’d have at least a twelve-hour lead and could be out of the country. One quick stop in the Caymans to tap his stash, and then he could shed this identity and disappear. Why not let Marcus, Constance, even Aguirre deal with this? They wanted to keep their damned secrets, let them.

Even as he thought it, he knew that it was just a fantasy and that he’d never go through with it.

It wasn’t as if the government would let someone like him wander too far from the reservation in any case. He thought of his friend Grigori, a Ukrainian expat who’d been Zorzi’s human partner in UMBRA. They’d found him in an upscale brothel in Rio after someone had given him a dose of something that hadn’t agreed with his health. This happened only one week after he’d announced that he wasn’t going to play ball anymore and that he was going to retire and be “nose-deep in Brazilian butt floss” for the rest of his days. Well, Alex had to admit, that part had been true. He couldn’t help but think that the end of his days had come a hell of a lot sooner than Grigori would have liked.

Alex arrived at his condominium complex and pulled up to the gate. He lowered the window and reached out to the small keypad on the drive-up stand. He punched the key code but nothing happened. Annoyed at having “fat-fingered” the code, Alex started to punch it in again. He felt sticky and tired and wanted nothing more than to have a nice pull at his water pipe and then maybe go down to the beach and soak in the daylight.

That paperwork could wait. They couldn’t really do anything to him anyway.

He froze as he continued punching in the code. He was getting a bad feeling. Maybe it was wired. No. It would have just gone off after he punched it in the first time. If someone had really recognized Marcus for who he was, anything was possible.

He was compromised. Maybe he was just being paranoid. On the other hand, he’d been sloppy lately. He decided to err on the conservative side.

He briefly slipped his ka from his body and headed skyward for a bird’s-eye view. Everything looked normal. Except …

There was a white sedan on the corner with two humans inside. They were just sitting there. It didn’t make sense, unless, of course, they were a surveillance team. Whose surveillance team? That was the real question. And why? If they were there to remote-trigger a bomb, they’d had plenty of time to set it off already. If they were there to verify that a bomb had gone off, well, they didn’t have to be sitting on the corner for that.

He was overreacting. They wouldn’t use a bomb, not in this political climate. It would be too big, impossible for the media to ignore.

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